Towards a general model of skills involved in sight reading music

Sight reading is a functional skill which is essential for all musicians involved in particular fields of western classical music culture. In the last decade, expertise theory has shown that time spent on activities is a good predictor for later achievement in a domain. However, this study is based on the hypothesis that general and elementary cognitive skills as well as practice-related skills must be considered in the explanation of outstanding sight-reading achievement. Different component skills involved in sight reading were attributed to one of three categories: (a) general cognitive skills (working memory, short-term music memory, short-term numerical memory, and Raven’s D Matrices); (b) elementary cognitive skills (speed tapping, simple reaction time, trilling speed, and speed of information processing); (c) practice-related skills (practicing solo, sight reading, and inner hearing skills). This resulted in a total set of 23 predictors. These tests were used to evaluate the potential correlates of sight-reading ability. A prerecorded pacing melody paradigm was used for the sight-reading tasks. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the best combination of predictors is trilling speed, sight-reading expertise acquired up to the age of 15, speed of information processing, and inner hearing. These four predictors can explain 59.6% of variance. Excellence in sight reading is, therefore, the result of a combination of components assumed to be practice-related (sight-reading expertise and inner hearing) and practice-unrelated (speed of information processing). Trilling speed is interpreted in terms of an intersection between task-specific training and practice-independent advantages in movement speed. Our proposed ‘general model’ of sight reading is the completion of our ‘dynamic model’ that appeared in an earlier issue of this journal.