Procedures for Sight-Reading (PTSII)

PTS II is a computer program available only through your optometrist. It is installed in your home computer. There are 11 exercises to work on and you advance levels only if you meet the requirements. (I have been describing my experiences with each exercise on this blog)

PTSII procedures for sight-reading are:

-Speed of information processing;
-Perceptual span;
-Peripheral Vision;
-Visual attention;
-Visual memory;
-Ocular motility.

All 11 exercises enhance these skills.

How Musicians Process Information

In our everyday activities, all of us learn and process information either simultaneously or sequentially. This perceptual-cognitive theory was developed by Alexander Luria (1966) and later expanded by Das (1979) and Naglieri and Das (1997).
When musicians look at a triad they quickly recognize its shape and its inversion (spatial configuration). They see it as a whole, all at once. This is an example of processing information simultaneously. In order to spell such triad (and scales), musicians have to use their sequential processing skills (linear approach).
The speed of information processing skills is an essential component to learning and reading and can be improved by doing the appropriate exercises. “It can be shown that increases in processing speed are linked to increases in other cognitive domains, which include sight-reading” (PTS II Documentation and sight-reading).


According to the authors, the exercises presented on the PTS II program are designed to enhance Information Processing Skills, Temporal Visual Processing skills and Rapid Automatized Naming skills.

Information Processing Skills is the ability our brain has to recognize, understand, stores and responds to information collected by our five senses. (article)

Temporal Visual Processing (TVP) is the means by which musicians process brief short stimuli and rapid sequences of information during sight-reading. TVP is responsible for the manner musicians make choices and prioritize information. Such choices vary from identifying and individualizing single notes to perceiving large stimuli presented in sequences such as chords, scales, accompaniment styles, arpeggios, etc. TVP also controls the musician’s capacity to change fixations form note-to-note, beat-to-beat, and so on. Improvements on this area result in more fluency and better comprehension. Even a small deficit on TVP can compromise reading ability, can cause loss of place while reading, visual fatigue, slow reading speed, symbols overlapping, lack of comprehension and frustration. (PTS II)

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is the ability to recognize and name harmony, notes, accompaniment patterns, sequences and rhythms in a fast an accurate way.

A Second "Look" at the Tachistoscopic Exercise and Reading Music

Tachistoscopic perception is the capacity to identify and reproduce a visual stimulus presented rapidly, usually faster than 1/25 of a second. It is used chiefly to assess visual perception, memory or to increase reading speed. Tachistoscopic perception requires Perceptual Speed, Visual Memory, Visualization and Temporal Visual Processing.
This exercises is recommended for reading fast music. It spans the visual field and problem solving. One has opportunity to group fast stimulus into chunks. It develops working memory by adding a distractor before you enter your answer. The purpose of the distractors is to retain certain information while simultaneously processing the other task.

Tachistoscopic Exercises for Musicians

Although tachistoscopic ability is a very important skill for all readers, exercising this ability alone does not guaranty improvements on your sight-reading. In fact, experiments with tach practice for musicians by using musical examples had unimpressive results.
I found a reasonable explanation for such results on an article called “Eye Movements in Reading: Facts and Fallacies” by Stanford E. Taylor. He reports:"No studies to date have shown that training to widen span has resulted in the ability to see in phrases during continuous reading. Feinberg's study (1949) suggested that physiological limitations of the eye will probably prevent readers from ever reaching this goal. It is rather startling to note that despite the findings of over a hundred studies of eye movements, writers of reading improvement texts have persisted in this misconception. Perhaps they have done so because they know a person can see 3 or 4 words when STARING at a print or when words are flashed TACHISTOSCOPICALLY. This is possible because the seeing situation is STATIC, allowing time to assimilate the less distinct impressions that occur in the periphery. The situation is in direct contrast to that encountered during reading, when retinal impressions are superimposed on preceding ones at the rate of 3 to 5 per second in a DYNAMIC act where the kinesthesia of the ocular activity and the sequence of impressions further reduce the already tenuous peripheral impressions. In addition, there is the demand for continuously ORGANIZING the MULTIPLE IDEAS presented in reading material. Consequently, the span of recognition in reading is distinctly smaller than that occurring and measured in STATIC seeing situations and may be thought of as "salvage" span. "


Musicians in order to improve their sight-reading abilities need more then just tach exercises because seeing a stationary target is different then seeing dynamic ones
K.L. Bean(1938)has researched and tested musicians doing tach exercises by using musical samples. His results are mentioned in detail on a paper called "A Cognitive Model of Musical Sight-Reading" by Thomas Wolf (1976). Here is the conclusion about musicians practicing tach alone: ” While there was some improvement, the results were generally unimpressive. Only 25% of the subjects improved significantly in both speed and accuracy of reading."
Wolf goes on reporting that “To get to the heart of this matter, we must worry less about what musicians see on the page and devote more attention to the cognitive processing which allows him to transfer the visual image into muscular act.”

This option by Wolf is what researchers call "information processing skills" or "problem solving". I wrote about problem solving on my previous entry.


The best tach exercise I found so far is the one on the PTS II program. I will describe them and post my results once again. I have not yet found a tach exercise for musicias. However, it really DOES NOT matter how you exercise this skill. Once your eyes learn a skill, they will apply it everywhere despite the target you are using. (This is the focus of a lecture I am giving for the MTNA Conference in March 2011 - Milwaukee).
Last night I reader e mailed me about suggesting some tach exercises. There is good exercise on a site called "Tachistoscope-Electronic Literature Collection"*
Another option is the PTS II which you need to acquire through a developmental optometrist. - If you know some tach exercises for musicians, we would love for you to share with us.
I am currently trying a program called EyeQ which although very good, has a brief and very simple tach exercise. There is a program called Eagle Eye available on the Luminosity.com site. I have not seeing it yet. But their exercises are usually great.
I will work and report on the Eagle Eye in the future.

Curiosity: Measuring perceptual span by using tach tests( performed by Weaver, 1943), produces an overestimate because musicians are able to guess some notes (Wolf,1997).

*I am sorry, for some reason, I failed to print the link for you

The Problem of Problem Solving in Sight-Reading

Along with short-term memory, our capacity to solve problems is crucial to for sight-reading. It involves very sophisticated perceptual and cognitive abilities. Given that we cannot read all the notes on the score while sight-reading, we must sometimes:
- Leave out “unnecessary” notes.
- Complete or even “guess” musical passages.
- Make instant decisions about fingering, articulation, phrasing, harmony, etc.
- Make rapid decisions about where and how to look at chords and different compositional styles such as polyphonic and homophonic writings.
- Combine long musical passages into chunks (e.g., scales, arpeggios, accompaniment patterns, melodic sequences).

Garzia (Vision and Reading,1996) says, that decision making refers to visual cognitive style and there is a continuum decision making while reading that requires a reflective and thoughtful problem solver.

PTS II offers several exercises that enhance working memory and problem solving skills.

Exercise X - Visual Sequential Processing or "Eyes out of Orbit"

According to the PTS II manual, Visual Sequential Processing develops the ability to identify and count a specific stimulus that is repeated in a sequence of different stimuli. Visual Sequential Processing requires Temporal Visual Processing, Perceptual Speed, Visual Attention, Visual Concentration and Saccadic Fixation.

You have to count the number of times a specified stimulus appears in sequence of stimuli. The target flashes inside of a box and then a series of letters, numbers or pictures will be flashed on the screen.

Variables:

There are four types of stimuli: Pictures(very difficult because they are somehow stylized and not very clear), Upper Case Letters, Lower Case Letters, Numbers
Stimuli Size: Medium and Large.
Speed of Stimuli: there are seven speeds ranging from slow to fast.
Number of Stimuli: it varies from 20 to 60 stimuli.
Stimuli Placement Patterns: there are six progressive placement patterns utilized.

The patterns could have a fixed or a random presentation.
In the fixed presentation, the stimuli will be presented in a fixed order and location. In the random presentation, the location of the stimuli in the sequence within a level will be randomized: it could show up on random places on the screen.
At this point, the speed is very fast. Hold on to your eye balls her or they go out of the orbit :o

It improves concentration, attention and saccadic fixation and speed. Good exercise for fast music.

Eye-Hand/Voice Span and Perceptual Span

Eye-Hand/Voice Span: measures how far ahead the eyes are from the hand/voice

Skilled readers Less skilled readers

4 notes 2 notes (Furneaux and Land)
about 2 beats under one beat (Truit at al.)
2 beats 0.5 beat (Rayner and Pollatsek)
1-2 notes 1-2 notes (Weaver) (more complex music)
4 beats (singers- Goolsby, 1994)
0 up to 2 notes (Jacobsen, 1941)


(I think it is more effective to measure EHS in beats because of the “chunking” abilities of the musicians-one beat can include several notes).

All researchers agree that the EHS of the musicians is small.
Truitt at al conclude that musicians do not need to see more then one measure ahead of the hands/voice in order to read well and readers rarely extract information beyond a measure (4 beats). However small, that does not mean that the visual process of the music is not ahead of the fixation (Weaver, 1943; Goolsby, 1994; Kinsler and Carpenter, 1995).
Rayner and Pollatsek state: “This discrepancy between the data and conventional wisdom might be due to the fact that musicians, like all human perceivers, are seduced by the illusion that information can be extracted from a wider region of vision than is actually possible”. (1997)


Perceptual Span: it measures the size of the visual field and our awareness of it. The perceptual span is the region around the fixation in which we obtain some information.

Both Truit at al and Rayner and Pollatsek (1997) found that, contrary to the musicians believes, the perceptual span is also small (the visual processing is also close to the hands). Its size is more or less one measure. That is > 2 < 4 notes ahead of the hands. Visual processing for musicians is also comparable to reading aloud (1.1 words for adults and less then half a word for a 1st grader-Garzia) and typing (about 6 characters-Rayner and Pollatsek).
(When researchers measure the EHS, they are taking the average and when they measure the perceptual span, they take the maximum).


Rayner and Pollatsek concluded that the less skilled reader when combining the EHS and the PS, extract useful information up to about 3 or 4 beats ahead of the hands. For skilled readers, the combination leads to only up to 5 beats ahead of the hands.

In the article Eye Movements in Reading: Facts and Fallacies by Stanford E. Taylor, he estates that “No studies to date have shown that training to widen span has resulted in the ability to see in phrases during continuous reading. Feinberg’s study (1949) suggested that the physiological limitations of the eye will probably present readers from ever reaching this goal “… when retinal impressions are superimposed on preceding ones at the rate of 3 to 5 per second in a dynamic act where the kinesthesia of the ocular activity and the sequence of impressions further reduce the already rather tenuous peripheral impressions. In addition, there is the demand for continually organizing the multiple ideas presented in reading material. Consequently, the span of recognition in reading is distinctly smaller than that occurring and measured in static seeing situations (Taylor, 1957) and maybe thought of as “salvageable” span”.