Sight reading

Sight reading is the reading and performing of a work—typically, a piece of music, but sometimes also linguistic texts like drama—without having seen it before.

In music
When singers sight read, it is often called sight singing.

Studio musicians (that is, musicians employed to record pieces for commercials, etc.) often record pieces on the first take without having seen it before. Often, the music played on television is played by musicians who are sight reading. This practice has developed through intense commercial competition in these industries.

In some circumstances, such as examinations, the ability of a student to sight read is assessed by presenting the student with a short piece of music, with an allotted time to peruse the music, then testing the student on the accuracy of the performance. A harder kind of test requires the student to perform without any preparation at all.

The ability to sight read partly depends on a strong short-term musical memory. An experiment on sight reading using an eye tracker indicates that highly skilled musicians tend to look ahead further in the music, storing and processing the notes until they are played; this is referred to as the eye–hand span.

Storage of notational information in working memory can be expressed in terms of the amount of information (load) and the time for which it must be held before being played (latency). The relationship between load and latency changes according to tempo, such that t = x/y, where t is the change in tempo, x is the change in load, and y is the change in latency. Some teachers and researchers have proposed that the eye–hand span can be trained to be larger than it would otherwise be under normal conditions, leading to more robust sight reading ability.

Sight reading also depends on familiarity with the musical idiom being performed; this permits the reader to recognize and process frequently occurring patterns of notes as a single unit, rather than individual notes, thus achieving greater efficiency. This phenomenon, which also applies to the reading of language, is referred to as chunking. Errors in sight reading tend to occur in places where the music contains unexpected or unusual sequences; these defeat the strategy of "reading by expectation" that sight readers typically employ.

Highly skilled musicians can sight-read silently; that is, they can look at the printed music and hear it in their heads without playing or singing; see Audiation. (True sight-reading or sight-singing—not code-deciphering—is actually notational audiation.) Less able sight-readers generally must at least hum or whistle in order to sight-read effectively. This distinction is analogous to ordinary prose reading during the early Middle Ages, when the ability to read silently was notable enough for St. Augustine to comment on it.

In drama
Sight-reading is also a much-needed requirement in drama, where it is often used in conjunction with improvisations to gauge a performer's ability to perform new works. It is particularly useful during auditions. A good drama sightreader is able to communicate with fluency and clarity and to project speech rhythms and rhymes well. He or she should also be able to bring out the intent, mood and characterization of a piece through appropriate articulation and body language.

Assessment and standards
Washington State has piloted a classroom based assessment which requires 5th and higher grade students to sight sing from sheet music without the aid of instruments. It is suggested that students use solfege or numbering systems or fingering without instruments as aids. Sight singing is a learning requirement in the state at the 8th grade level. Most students and adults cannot sight sing, and many professional singers cannot sing by sight. However, in combination with an assessment which requires composing music on a staff as early as 5th grade, it is hoped that such a requirement will raise arts achievement. Pilot data show that many students can meet or exceed such standards. Other states are evaluating possible performance assessments as well.