Domain-specific and domain-general contributions to reading musical notation

Abstract

Musical practice may benefit not only domain-specific abilities, such as pitch discrimination and music performance, but also domain-general abilities, like executive functioning and memory. Behavioral and neural changes in visual processing have been associated with music-reading experience. However, it is still unclear whether there is a domain-specific visual ability to process musical notation. This study investigates the specificity of the visual skills relevant to simple decisions about musical notation. Ninety-six participants varying in music-reading experience answered a short survey to quantify experience with musical notation and completed a test battery that assessed musical notation reading fluency and accuracy at the level of individual note or note sequence. To characterize how this ability may relate to domain-general abilities, we also estimated general intelligence (as measured with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices) and general object-recognition ability (as measure by a recently proposed construct o). We obtained reliable measurements on our various tasks and found evidence for a domain-specific ability of the perception of musical notation. This music-reading ability and domain-general abilities were found to contribute to performance on specific tasks differently, depending on the level of experience reading music.