Expert musical reading is supported by activation of harmony rules during cross-modal integration
Résumé
Multisensory integration of musical information is an important process in music reading. Integrate many sensory inputs (visual, auditory, motor) into a coherent pathway emerges during development of musical skill. We hypothesize that more skilled musicians can retrieve information across auditory and visual modalities, activating harmony rules as retrieval cues. The aim of the present research is to investigate this issue using the eye-tracking technique. Musicians (experts and non-experts) were asked to detect as fast as possible a modified note between listening and reading phases. Randomized fragments of classical music were sequentially versus simultaneously displayed in cross-modal presentation on a computer. The note was modified in the same tone mode or in a violation tone mode. Results from ocular measures and modified note detection accuracy validated the hypothesis of expert memory using harmony rules as retrieval cues. However, sequential presentation was more difficult than simultaneous one: number of fixations and gaze duration were shorter when fragments were displayed simultaneously compared to sequentially. Experts made significantly less fixations than Non-Experts when they listened and read the fragments simultaneously but this difference between expert and non-experts was no longer significant when it came sequentially. Results are discussed in terms of amodal processing in expert memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995; Drai-Zerbib & Baccino, 2014).