Aria is 10 years old, and has been studying piano with me
for many years. She’s small for her age, with a shy, soft voice and a wry sense
of humour. At her lesson, I test her note-naming and find it, to be perfectly
frank, abysmal. We continue on
with the lesson, and start work on a new piece, Beethoven’s Ecossaise in G Major. I ask her to
sight-read the right hand part, and she peers at the music, figuring out what
the first note is. Then she plays through the first line of music fairly well,
doing an excellent job considering her terrible performance at note-naming.
However, in the second bar, there is an interval of a seventh. She misreads the
second note of the interval, ending up playing the end of the phrase a step too
low.
Despite not knowing her notes very well, Aria is a
half-decent sight-reader because she mostly reads by interval, simply going up
or down one note (a step) or two (a skip) as the music indicates. Larger
intervals are harder to read, so she sometimes makes mistakes with these, and
reading over a line break is much more difficult because it’s hard to see the
vertical relationship between the notes when they are on different lines.
Leonard, 9 years old, arrives for his lesson with a cheerful
smile. He has been learning The Silent Moon by Nancy Telfer, but
when he plays it for me, he quickly runs into trouble, hitting a wrong note in
the second phrase. He can hear it too,
and restarts the phrase, this time landing on a different wrong note in the
same place. I notice that Leonard is not looking at the music; he is watching
his fingers. Despite the fact that the music book is open on front of him, he is
playing from memory, searching for the notes by ear. I’m concerned about his
ability to read the music, so I test his note-naming using stack of flashcards.
Leonard names the notes quickly and easily, so I open up his sight-reading book
to a simple exercise. Before he plays
it, I ask him to look at the music and tell me how many times the melody moves
by a skip instead of step. He puzzles through the music and incorrectly tells
me there are three skips in the melody. In fact, there is only one.
These two students use entirely different strategies for
reading music. Leonard does well at reading
by note, while Aria’s strength is reading by interval. Strong sight-readers combine the two
strategies. What you might not realize is that the two different strategies use
entirely different parts of the brain.
When we read music, the visual information travels from the
eyes to the visual cortex at the very back of the brain. The visual cortex receives that information
and then passes it on to other regions of the visual cortex that process that
information, sorting out contours of the things we see, how they’re oriented in
space, if they’re moving, what colour they are, and how bright. The brain needs
to do two main things with all this information: It has to answer the question
“what am I seeing?” and it has to answer the question “what should I do with
what I’m seeing?”
To answer these two questions, visual information is
processed through two very different pathways in the brain, known as the ventral stream (vision for perception)
and the dorsal stream (vision for
action).
 |
| Dorsal stream (red arrow) and ventral stream (blue arrow) of visual processing. Image courtesy of "BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan." |
The ventral stream, which involves the temporal lobe of the brain,
has long been known as the “what” stream, since it is the pathway we use to
recognize and name the things we are seeing. It is this pathway that we use for
note-naming. Imagine we see a note on the first space of the treble staff. In
the ventral stream, what we see match up the image of what we see with pictures
we have stored in memory, and this is how we know to name that note as a F.
This is how we recognize what we see, leading to a conscious perception of what
we are looking at, and a conscious understanding of what we see. In music
reading, we use the ventral stream for note-naming, recognizing musical symbols
and understanding their meaning, for conscious pattern recognition, and for
naming chords.
It’s this ventral stream that is a weakness in Aria’s sight-reading.
She has a hard time naming individual notes, so finding the correct note to play
at the beginning of a line or after a large interval is difficult. Leonard, on the other hand, has a strong
ventral stream, but on its own it is not enough to make him a good
sight-reader. He also needs to have a
strong dorsal stream.
The dorsal stream, which involves the parietal lobe, directly
relates what we see to the actions that are required. The parietal lobe plays
an important role in spatial perception, and so this pathway processes the
spatial aspects of what we’re looking at, and matches it up with our knowledge
of what to do with that object. This activates the correct movement. In music reading, we use the dorsal stream to
know what movements to make to play straight-forward patterns, to know how far
to reach for each interval, to make the correct hand shapes for chords. The
dorsal stream automatically converts well-known visual cues into movements.
This is why Aria, who is terrible at note-naming, can sight-read
music pretty well. Her dorsal stream does a good job of reading intervals and
telling her what finger movements she should make. Leonard, on the other hand, tries to rely on his ventral stream for reading music. He can name the
notes well, but he doesn’t easily translate the written notes into how he should move his fingers.
How do I help these two students? It’s not enough to just hand them a
sight-reading book and tell them to go practice. Aria needs to practice note-naming
specifically: matching up notes on the
staff with their names. In addition, she
should practice playing individual notes on the piano. Flashcards are a good tool here. Leonard has different needs: he should practice reading
intervallically. An excellent resource
for this is The Sight Reading Drill Book by Barbara Siemens, which systematically introduces intervals and
chord patterns, and encourages the student to read by interval and by hand
shape rather than by note-naming, strengthening the dorsal stream of visual
processing. Siemens describes this approach by saying, “It’s a
mind-finger thing. I think sometimes you
have to try to bypass that naming thing and just do it intuitively. Which means you have to drill it enough.” As an experienced piano teacher, Siemens saw
a need in her own students for intervallic sight-reading practice. “Because you don’t have time to think of
notes as you’re going. The name thing is
just attaching a tag to something that should go intuitively.”
Every student has different strengths and weaknesses. This
is true even within a single skill such as sight-reading. As a teacher, it’s important
that I remember that and use different approaches to bolster students’
abilities and help them achieve their musical goals.
References
Goodale, M.A. (2011). Transforming vision into
action. Vision Res. 51, 1567–1587.
Goodale, M.A. (2013). Separate visual systems for
perception and action: a framework for understanding cortical visual
impairment. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology 55, 9–12.
Goodale, M.A., and Milner, A.D. (1992). Separate
visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences 15,
20–25.
Ungerleider, L.G., and Mishkin, M. (1982). Two
Cortical Visual Systems. In Analysis of Visual Behaviour, (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press), pp. 549–586.
