Abstract
Performing music on the basis of reading a score requires reading ahead of what is being played in order to anticipate the necessary actions to produce the notes. Score reading thus not only involves the decoding of a visual score and the comparison to the auditory feedback, but also short-term storage of the musical information due to the delay of the auditory feedback during reading ahead. This study investigates the mechanisms of encoding of musical information in short-term memory during such a complicated procedure. There were three parts in this study. First, professional musicians participated in an electroencephalographic (EEG) experiment to study the slow wave potentials during a time interval of short-term memory storage in a situation that requires cross-modal translation and short-term storage of visual material to be compared with delayed auditory material, as it is the case in music score reading. This delayed visual-to-auditory matching task was compared with delayed visual-visual and auditory-auditory matching tasks in terms of EEG topography and voltage amplitudes. Second, an additional behavioural experiment was performed to determine which type of distractor would be the most interfering with the score reading-like task. Third, the self-reported strategies of the participants were also analyzed. All three parts of this study point towards the same conclusion according to which during music score reading, the musician most likely first translates the visual score into an auditory cue, probably starting around 700 or 1300 ms, ready for storage and delayed comparison with the auditory feedback.
Highlights
Musical notation is a system in which visual symbols are used to represent sound patterns
To verify whether the slow wave potentials related to short-term memory were truly larger in the VA, A-A, and V-V conditions than in the A/V condition, the integrated global field potential (GFP) between 1200 and 1600 ms was compared between the conditions
Post hoc paired t-tests revealed that all conditions involving shortterm memory processes (V-A, A-A, and V-V) had slow wave potentials of larger GFP than the condition that did not require short-term memory (A/V), with V-A: p = 0.005, with A-A: p = 0.006, with V-V: p = 0.007
Summary
Musical notation is a system in which visual symbols are used to represent sound patterns. Performing music while reading a score requires reading ahead of what is being played in order to anticipate the necessary actions to produce the notes. Score reading involves the decoding of a visual score and a comparison of it with the auditory feedback, and short-term storage of the musical information due to the delay of the auditory feedback during reading ahead. This study investigates the mechanism of encoding of musical information in short-term memory. We aimed to distinguish between two possible mechanisms: a visual score could be kept in memory as a visual cue until the moment of comparison with subsequent auditory feedback, or, alternatively, it could be translated immediately and stored as an auditory cue, ready for comparison to subsequent auditory feedback
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