The present study investigated how knowledge of tonality is used in sight-reading by comparing sight-reading accuracy across three tonal constructs: major, minor and atonal. It was hypothesized that sight-reading performance would be the worst in instances with no tonal information, as participants would be unable to generate appropriate top-down expectancies to guide their sight-reading. To test this, twelve pianists sight-read major, minor and atonal versions of monophonic, homophonic and polyphonic excerpts. The results indicated that pianists performed the major excerpts with greater accuracy than the atonal excerpts. Furthermore, the errors made within the major excerpts were significantly biased towards diatonicism, and there was a global shift towards tonality in participants’ atonal performances, providing a clear demonstration of how pianists’ expectations might have contributed to their sight-reading performance. The diatonic bias was not found in the minor excerpts, suggesting that the minor hierarchy does exert as strong of an influence during sight-reading.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/43303 |
| Date | 10 December 2013 |
| Creators | Podolak, Olivia Magdalena |
| Contributors | Schmuckler, Mark |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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