Reading musical notation; practice strategies for music

Musical notation provides structured musical information that can be read by musicians – and this means that musicians use their knowledge from long-term memory to understand the information, to apply it for planning and executing movements, and to form expectations. Just as we don't have to read every letter to recognize words when reading text, as we did as beginners, musical notation contains musically coherent information that can be recognized as such with practice (for example, chords or rhythmic building blocks). In order to understand how musical information is recognized, we use theories on the interaction of working memory and long-term memory. We explore the cognitive schemata (“chunks”) that play a role in musical notation reading.

To this end, we work together with the Mannheim University of Music and invite music students to take part in experiments. We measure eye movements when reading sheet music. From the short-term memory performance with unfamiliar pieces and the eye movements, we draw conclusions about how the music is represented in the memory of musicians and how prior knowledge influences recognition and short-term retention.

However, we are also interested in how learning to read music works and how amateur musicians read music and apply what they have read when practicing. There are big differences in how people read musical notation. That is why we are also developing diagnostic methods to measure how well chunks (e.g. chords and their inversions in musical notation) are accessible in long-term memory and how this affects practice. We are also developing approaches as to how the learning of musical notation can be improved in targeted training sessions – with interactive and multimedia applications. And we are interested in which practicing methods contribute to the long-term retention of pieces of music.

Corresponding researchers: Prof. Dr. Stefan Münzer, Hatice Dedetas
Dr. Lucas Lörch completed his doctorate at the Chair of Psychology of Education on the topic of chunking when reading musical notation and was supervised by Prof. Stefan Münzer (University of Mannheim) and Prof. Erkki Huovinen (Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden).

Lörch, L. (2022). Chunking in tonal contexts: Information compression during serial recall of visually presented musical notes. Psychology of Music, 50(3), 691–708.

Lörch, L. (2021). The association of eye movements and performance accuracy in a novel sight-reading task. Journal of eye movement research, 14(4), 10-16910. DOI: 10.16910/jemr.14.4.5

Lörch, L., Lemaire, B., & Portrat, S. (2023). A hebbian model to account for musical expertise differences in a working memory task. Cognitive Computation, 15(5), 1620-1639. doi.org/10.1007/s12559-023-10138-3