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