Sight-singing is challenging for many music students, yet they can experience various difficulties with this task. To explore how cognitive load (CL) might differ among students, we combined two approaches: 1) a quantitative approach using pupil size diameter-a psychophysiological indicator of CL-to see whether CL differed as a function of sight-singing achievement and experience; 2) a qualitative approach to learn student's challenges when sight-singing and verify how such challenges reflect on sight-singing scores. We asked 56 post-secondary music students to complete a musical background questionnaire and to complete a sight-singing exercise, while an eye-tracker gathered data about their pupil size. After that, we interviewed them about the difficulties they experienced. The results revealed that CL did not vary between sight-singing performance and musical experience levels. However, we found a tendency suggesting that students with the highest intonation scores and lowest intonation scores both experienced a lower CL. On the contrary, CL was higher for students with average intonation scores. Interviews also revealed that many students experienced information overload while sight-singing, and students who shared such perception obtained, on average, lower sight-singing scores. Future studies should include qualitative data collection to deepen our understanding of learners' experiences.
Sight-singing is prevalent in aural skill classes, where learners differ in experience and cognitive abilities. In this research, we investigated whether musical experience, level of study, and working memory capacity (WMC) can predict sight-singing performance and if there is a correlation between WMC and performance among some subgroups of participants. We hypothesized that more experienced students and those with a higher WMC might sight-sing better than those with less experience and lesser WMC. We also hypothesized that the relationship between WMC and sight-singing performance would be more salient for less experienced and less proficient sight-singers. We surveyed 56 subjects about their experience with music, assessed their WMC, and evaluated their performance on a short sight-singing task. The results showed that the age when students began learning music could predict sight-singing performance independently from the number of years of experience and the educational level, suggesting a possible developmental component to sight-singing skill. We also found a negative relationship between WMC and pitch score in the low-performing group and between rhythm and pitch score, suggesting that pitch and rhythm are processed differently. Teachers should be aware of how students’ backgrounds might be related to performance and encourage them to develop strong automated skills, such as reading music or singing basic tonal patterns.
Sight-singing is an inescapable component of music training in higher education and is often challenging for students. However, some strategies could help students perform. Yet, the extent to which students can use strategies to improve their sight-singing performance remains unclear. This article asks two questions to fill this gap: (1) Which strategies do students use when sight-singing? (2) Does the application of some types of strategy predict performance? We recruited 56 postsecondary music students and asked them about their musical backgrounds. They then sight-sang a short melody while we recorded their eye movements. After that, we conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews, using eye-movement videos and attention distribution heatmaps to help participants remember the strategies they used. We analyzed the interview transcripts to identify the strategies students used and regrouped them into categories. We extracted seven categories and discovered that using body movements predicted rhythm scores, that using musical knowledge predicted pitch and combined scores, and that relying on automatic skills predicted all dimensions of sight-singing performance. We recommend that aural skills instructors teach strategies explicitly and help students develop robust musical knowledge, as they are required to build strong automatic skills.
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