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About

The ability to read and perform from written notation is a fundamental skill in many fields of music performance. While for many musicians, staff notation is both transparent and flexible, a medium that can be used fluently and imaginatively, it is frequently experienced as complex and difficult – as a form of communication it is nobody’s first language.

Stenberg and Cross (2019) showed that it is actually possible to make musical notation easier to read at sight with a minimal modification; adding white spaces to simple two-part pieces led to improved sight-reading performance compared to conventional staff notation. When reading text, spaces between words improve reading accuracy and fluency, even when added to writing systems that don’t traditionally feature them. While music reading is a more complex task, the introduction of white spaces to delineate phrases may delimit information uptake, analogous to how spaces help readers to identify word boundaries and process written information.

In this talk I will present the results from two experiments, conducted at the University of Cambridge and at the Royal Northern College of Music as part of the Score Design for Music Reading project, considering the impact of the added white spaces on accuracy and fluency and reviewing the main factors that appear to induce sight-reading errors.

Biographies

Ian Cross is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Emeritus Professor of Music and Science and a Director of Research at the University of Cambridge, having taught in the Faculty of Music from 1986 to 2021 and founded the Centre for Music and Science there in 2002. His widely cited research on music has encompassed psychoacoustics, cognitive neuroscience, experimental archaeology, evolutionary theory and the social effects of musical interaction. He is also a classical guitarist.

David Duncan is a Fellow of Clare Hall and Research Assistant at the University of Cambridge. In addition to working on the Score Design for Music Reading project he works as a music engraver for Oxford University. Previously he worked in music publishing as an editor at Edition Peters and in qualification development for the London College of Music and RSL Awards.

Katya Ness is a doctoral researcher and research assistant at the University of Cambridge, working on the Leverhulme-funded Score Design for Music Reading project under the supervision of Professor Ian Cross. Her research investigates how modifications to conventional notation can support children’s sight-reading fluency and accuracy, building on her background in performance science and earlier work on how students develop sight-reading skills. Alongside her research, she is active as a teacher and accompanist.

Tickets

Free admission, no ticket required

Promoted by RNCM.

This event will end at approximately 5.30pm.