L'expertise dans la lecture musicale : intégration intermodale

Abstract

Summary : Expertise in musical reading : cross-modal integration This article presents an experiment using eye-tracking analysis to describe the role of expertise in musical sight-reading, particularly, the construction of a retrieval structure (Ericsson and Kintsch, 1995) able to simplify access to musical knowledge. First, participants had to listen to piano scores and then to read and perform the score. Two versions of scores were used : with or without slurs either during the listening phase (auditory modality) or during the reading phase (visual modality). Results show that skilled readers have very low sensitivity to the written form of the score and instead reactivate a representation of the musical passage from the material listened to. In contrast, less skilled readers (novices) seem to be very dependent on the written code and on the input modality (auditory vs visual) and must build a new representation based on visual cues. Findings are analysed according to the C/I model of text comprehension (Kintsch, 1998) and theory of long term working memory (Ericsson and Kintsch, 1995).