Expertise in reading musical notation

Expert Behavior

Musicians and non-musicians differ in quite a number of ways in how they recognize musical notation behaviorally:

a) Experts can recognize musical notation three times faster than novices;

b) Unlike novices, musicians do not perceive music sequences as separate notes. Instead, they develop automatic sensitivity to the relationship between the notes.

c) Musicians learn to extract the identity of each musical note regardless of other visual features around, that creates a crowded visual image and makes music reading difficult. Importantly, the reduced crowding can be created by lab training, suggesting that it's an experience-driven effect rather than any innate differences in musicians.

d) Musicians learn to use the line junctions between the notes and the staff lines to support their musical notation recognition, while non-musicians are not affected by the presence or absence of the line junctions.

The Musical Brain - fMRI

Perhaps it is no surprise that the musical brain is tuned up for reading musical notes with extensive experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique, we found that a widespread multimodal network of brain regions is engaged simply by perceiving a single musical note. Remarkably, the activity in some of these brain regions is stronger for better music readers.

The Musical Brain - EEG

Using electroencephalography (EEG) technique, we found that the musical brain can tell a note from other similar visual images as early as 40-60ms after seeing it. More interestingly, this selective activity for notes is only observed when musicians expect to see more notes coming. This suggests that musicians selectively and flexibly recruit the primary visual cortex for musical notation recognition.

Interestingly, lab training of musical notation recognition led to recruitment of the higher visual cortex but not the primary visual cortex. This suggests that musicians' recruitment of the primary visual cortex for musical notation may involve additional non-visual factors in musical training.

Becoming Better Experts

Our recent work reports a powerful training paradigm that efficiently improves the fluency in reading musical notation within hours of training. The training paradigm is well-received by musicians and students through a mobile application available on Android / iOS (though it's no longer available now due to requirements of the newest operating systems).

Measuring Ability In Musical Notation Recognition

Recognizing musical notation is a fundamental ability in classical music training, and serves as a window for understanding multimodal expertise and brain development. We have developed a visual perceptual fluency task that reliably and validly measures one's ability in recognizing musical notation. Apart from its research values, it can be applied in real-world classrooms to tease apart whether the learning difficulty of music students (if any) comes from visual perceptual domain.