A few hundred years ago among the musically educated, picking up sheet music for the first time and playing it was akin to picking up a book and reading it out loud. During those times, in order to even be called a musician, you had to be able to sight-read. Most of the music that was played was never rehearsed, and only played few times. Music was not written to be remembered, it was written to be communicated to other musicians. Steadily, as memorisation became more common and having a repertoire was expected of musicians, the need for sight-reading decreased. Nowadays few people would make the comparison between sight-reading music and reading a book out loud.
Sight-reading may no longer be a prerequisite to being considered a musician, however, having that ability still brings immense advantages to learning pace, and hireability as a professional musician. You may be able to get away with mediocre reading capabilities for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you, and by that point, the gap between your playing and reading abilities will be so great that it becomes difficult and frustrating to bridge.
In my experience, piano educators have failed at stressing this fact, and at providing a path for improving my sight-reading skills. Advice such as: look ahead, don’t look at your hands, keep a steady tempo, don’t stop if you make mistakes, is useful but insufficient. Teaching is about more than giving principles; students need a plan, actionable steps, and the ability to observe progress. It’s not just about practising more, it’s about leveraging our current understanding of perception, memory, and motor skills to get more effective results from our practise.
By identifying the sub-skills required for sight-reading, we will be able to design supplementary exercises to target deficient areas, and track progress with more ease.
Sub-skills
Audiation
It may not be obvious that the ability to hear music in your head is an important sub-skill of sight-reading. For a long time, I would have put musicians with good ears, and musicians with great reading capabilities in two separate camps. Turns out that great sight-readers also have good ears.
For one, audiation (the ability to hear music in your head) allows for realistic preparation; the ability to practise something before actually doing it is obviously beneficial to performance. Also, by establishing a set of musical expectations before starting performance, we are giving ourself the roadmap of the piece, allowing us to detect errors, anticipate potentially more difficult sections, and improvise with relative accuracy. In a 2008 study on pianists' sight-reading, authors Kopiez and Lee found that inner hearing (another term for audiation) was found to be a good predictor of sight-reading ability¹.
Memory
Being able to look ahead while reading allows you to have more time to mentally prepare what you are about to play. Eye-hand span is a term describing the distance between the position of the eyes acquiring the information, and the hands executing it. As it turns out, it is a great predictor of sight-reading ability. Contrary to what the term eye-hand span may suggest, it has little to do with perception, and more to do with memory, specifically short-term memory.
If you are walking along a track, and you see a pothole up ahead, you don’t need to track it with your eyes to be able to step over it. Short-term memory is what allows you to hold some representation of the world from the time that your eyes perceive it, to the time that your legs encounter it. When reading music, and looking ahead, short-term memory is what allows you to keep looking ahead while playing what you previously saw.
Short-term memory has a fixed size (sort of), but that doesn’t mean that it can’t hold more information with the correct training. Similar to how you can squish a sandwich to fit in your lunch box, you can compress information by creating abstractions. Think of notes in a sequence as individual pieces of information, the longer the sequence, the larger the amount of information. Now imagine the set of notes actually turns out to be a descending C major scale. For one bit of information (C major scale) we have encoded the whole sequence of notes. Long-term memory, our ability to recognise patterns is the mechanism that allows us to compress information is such a way that we can store more of it in short-term memory.
Sight-reading requires good short-term memory to allow us to look ahead, and also good long-term memory of music to enable efficient encoding of information.
Problem solving
When sight-reading, you will inevitably come across a passage of music that you are unable to decipher and encode in time before you get to playing it. In those situations, you will have to make an educated guess and improvise the passage. This might seem like a surprising statement, but watch any talented sight-reader play a piece you know well, and see how many mistakes would have gone undetected if you didn’t know the piece. Sight-reading is just as much about guessing as it is about reading.
Your ability to improvise and make educated guesses about music that you are unable to read is what makes the difference between being able to play through mistakes and totally losing the flow.
Kinaesthetic
Alternating between looking at the page and looking at your hands makes the task of sight-reading much more difficult than it has to be. Having to move your eyes back and forth between the page and your hands breaks the flow of reading, making it slower to decipher, but also making it more likely that you will lose your place.
An important sub-skill of sight-reading is the ability to play music without looking at our hands. We should be able to do large jumps without looking, we should be able to easily transpose melodies by octaves. We should be able to find our way around the piano with no visual feedback whatsoever.
How to sight-read
Sight-reading is often done in the context of rehearsals. You will get handed some sheet music, and you will have some amount of time (sometimes as little as a minute) before you start playing. In order to make the most of that minute, you need a checklist of things to look at before starting to play, and a set of principles to follow when playing. We can split sight-reading into three stages.
Information gathering
- Key signature
- Time signature
- Any changes to the key/time signature
- Accidentals
- Any particularly difficult sections (a lot of notes, difficult rhythms, big jumps)
- Any repeating themes, or patterns (including transpositions)
- Chord progressions
- Anchor points to help you come back in when you’re lost
Preparation
If you have time, start to work on the sections you think will be difficult. Work on the beginning and the end, if nothing else, you will start and end strong.
Playing
If you have any say, try to get the band to play at a tempo you’ll be comfortable with for the entirety of the piece. Look ahead. Don’t look at your hands. Stay in time and don’t stop if you make a mistake. If you lose your bearings, pause and rejoin in the next bar, or next phrase, there is no point in fumbling or playing catchup.
Sight-reading can be daunting and stressful at first. It takes a lot of focus and is extremely tiring. If you can, try to get experience in lower stakes situations: play easy music, play with friends, play along to music by yourself. Confidence comes from skill: build your skills, build your stamina and you will be ready to tackle any reading challenge that comes your way.
How to practise sight-reading
Prerequisites
First, if you want to be able to sight-read, you need to be able to read. This means you should be able to read any note, and get to its physical location on the piano with no difficulty. You should also be able to read intervals (the distance between notes) with ease, as well as all kinds of chords, inversions and arpeggios.
All of these skills can be acquired outside of a sight-reading context. You should simply be able to read, that is to say, recognise these patterns.
Contextual and isolated practise
Once you have mastered the basics, practising sight-reading should be done on two fronts: practising the act of reading at first sight, and practising any sub-skills that were identified to be lacking when sight-reading.
If you find that you are unable to look ahead, you need to work on memory-related sub-skills. If you find yourself constantly looking away from the page and at your hand, you need to work on kinaesthetic sub-skills. If you find that you completely fall apart when you are unable to read a bar of music, you could benefit from working on problem solving sub-skills.
Audiation exercises
See here.
Memory exercises
Once you encounter a pattern in music you want to familiarise yourself with, isolate it, practise it in different keys, with slight variations, make sure you’re reading along as you do so you can make the connection between the visual and movement patterns. These patterns can range from Alberti bass and LH arpeggios to rhythmic cells and voice leading progressions.
Work on your short-term musical memory by using a flashing exercise. On a screen, flash musical fragments of increasing difficulty for decreasing amounts of time and try to memorise and play as much of them as possible. You can record yourself in order to review for accuracy later.
Analyse more music. Take some sheet music and without playing it, analyse it, find the chord sequences, the form, where the themes get developed. The more you do this, the better and faster you will get. This will help you encode information more efficiently and to do so quickly.
Problem solving exercises
Isolate chord progressions. Learn them in different keys, play them in different styles. This will help you recognise when you are in the middle of one so you can guess and improvise if you are unable to play.
Familiarise yourself with musical forms, styles, and methods for developing motifs. This will improve the quality of your guesses.
Play a lot of music from the same composer. If you have a sight-reading gig for J. S. Bach, read his chorales, read his easier works, learn his style and clichés.
Kinaesthetic exercises
Practise using the black notes to recognise where you are, and play specific notes at the piano. You should be able to place any finger on any note without having to look.
Practise large jumps at the piano without looking. Start with small jumps, use the black notes as guide posts, and gradually increase the size and speed of the jumps.
Practise transposing melodies and chord progressions around different cycles (fourths, semitones, tones, minor thirds) without looking.
Improve your technique, so that playing faster or more challenging passages takes less mental energy and focus.
Conclusion
Sight-reading seems like a difficult skill to acquire, but it is no more difficult than learning the piano. If you spend a sufficient amount of time practising sight-reading and its sub-skills, there should never be an enormous gap between what you can read, and what you can play.
