Musical Sight-Reading Expertise: Cross-Modality Investigations

It is often said that experienced musicians are capable of hearing what they read (and vice versa). This suggests that they are able to process and to integrate multimodal information. The study investigates this issue with an eye-tracking technique. Two groups of musicians chosen on the basis of their level of expertise (experts, non-experts) had to read excerpts of poorly-known classical piano music and play them on a keyboard. The experiment was run in two consecutive phases during which each excerpt was (1) read without playing and (2) sight-read (read and played). In half the conditions, the participants heard the music before the reading phases. The excerpts contained suggested fingering of variable difficulty (difficult, easy, or no fingering). Analyses of first-pass fixation duration, second-pass fixation duration, probability of refixations, and playing mistakes validated the hypothesized modal independence of information among expert musicians as compared to non-experts. The results are discussed in terms of amodal memory for expert musicians, and they extend clearly our previous findings (Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2005). The paper will demonstrate that more experienced performers are better able to transfer learning from one modality to another, which can be in support of theoretical work by Ericsson and Kintsch (1995): more experienced performers better integrate knowledge across modalities. This view relies on the general flexibility shown in the experts' behaviour. The paper will show the correspondence between our results and issues recently obtained in ERPs researches and brain imaging studies (fMRI, MEG), where cerebral structures generally associated with different perceptual modalities were shown to be interconnected or overlap