From: cbarber@bbn.com (Chris Barber)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Sightreading and Computers
Date: 19 Aug 92 16:17:22 GMT
Organization: BBN Systems and Technology, Inc.

In article <1992Aug18.045238.10336@news.cs.brandeis.edu> 
jacob@max.cc.brandeis.edu ( ) writes:

>One issue that hasn't been addressed in this discussion on sightreading is
>what exactly all those people want to learn to sightread for?

>Nobody has made that very clear as if sightreading was a goal in itself,
>whereas I believe as a skill in itself sightreading is a pretty useless
>skill to have. Sightreading is a means to an end and that those ends were
>not made exteremely explicit by those who were interested in sightreading...

I believe this thread was started by someone who stated that if had known how
to sightread he might have majored in music education.  In general, I found
that most people who express a desire to be able to sightread, see this skill
as a _tool_ that would be useful to them: a singer who would like to be able
to accompany herself, a musicologist who would like to be able to study scores
on the piano, a teacher who would like to be able to play musical examples
with ease (many of the latter would also like to be able to play anything at
ear also!). None of these people are interested in sightreading or even piano
playing as an _art_, they merely wan't to accomplish some musical task.

>For some motives of learning sightreading I would see a computer tutor as
>perfectly inappropriate because certain goals should be directly connected
>with a development of general musicianship that the very process of learning
>to sightread (efficiently, musically, as opposed to mechnically) should give
>you an opportunity for, whereas a mechanical computer tutor (especially if
>it tries to impose tempo and such) would give you too much opportunity to
>concentrate on the mechanical part at the expense of a real musical
>understanding of the text.

Exactly. My own undocumented observation has been that the better the
sightreader, the better the musician (note, I am not saying that all good
musicians are good sight readers). I think that an understanding of the music
is an integral part of sightreading ability. You will find that someone who has
an excellent ability to read Mozart, Bach and Beethoven by sight may fail
miserably when attempting to sightread Bartok. This is because when you learn
to sight read, you aren't merely learning how to play the notes on the page,
you are learning what notes are likely to be there given the style you are
playing in! Given a good enough knowledge of the style, it is not absolutely
necessary to look at every note. In fact, researchers in music psychology have
found that advanced sightreaders will often "correct" notes which don't match
their stylistic expectations. Several times in looking at music that I have
read, have found that I unconsciously ignored typos in the score. If the skill
were purely a mechanical translation of notation into keyboard motion, I
would have played the typos.

I think that learning to read music "at sight" shares much with learning to
read language.  They can only be taught upto a relatively elementary level,
and thereafter it is up to the student to learn for herself through practice.



-- 
Christopher Barber
(cbarber@bbn.com)