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them using knowledge retrieved from his or her long-
term memory, and then comprehends the meaning
the recognized objects considering the context where
they appear as they are. The result of comprehension
should affect to plan how to move the eye-balls in the
future cycles. This basic and general process is sum-
marized as follows:
move eye-balls → perceive objects → pay at-
tention to objects selectively → recognize ob-
jects using long-term memory → comprehend
contextually → move eye-balls → ···
In the following, the components, i.e., objects,
perceptual–cognitive–motor processes, and memory,
that appear in describing the basic and general
processes are further elaborated in the context of
musical score reading activity.
Objects: In case of reading musical score, there are
many symbols for representing musical sounds or
melody (syntax) and indicating how to play with
expression (semantics). Notes, rests, accidental,
meter, velocity, etc., are the symbols for syntax.
Dynamics, articulation, relation, etc., are those
for semantics. Objects are input to the perceptual
process, and output of the motor process, i.e., after
completion of an eye movement process, the resultant
visual field defines the objects to be processed in the
next perceptual process.
Perceptual–Cognitive–Motor Processes: In case of
piano playing, processes which a person carry out
are visual/auditory information processes including
making decision about how to react. For example,
when people receive objects via optic nerves, the
stimuli are carried to perceptual processes. In this
process, objects are the input information and sensory
memory is the output. Perceptual process plays a role
of maintaining the information.
Memory: In the domain of piano singing and
playing, three memory systems are relevant: sensory
memory, working memory, and long-term memory
systems.
Sensory memory systems include iconic, echoic,
and haptic memory systems, each of which is con-
cerned with the process of “reading” musical score,
“hearing” the sound he or she makes by playing the
piano, and “touching” the keyboard of the piano,
respectively. In the case of just reading musical
score this paper is concerned with only the iconic
memory is considered which which creates memory
that represents the type of musical symbols which
is regarded as “objects.” On reading musical score,
a person does not make any real sounds. However,
he or she would activate any relevant portions of
long-term memory that are associated with what he
or she is visually stimulated in any sense: this would
include memory of sound and touch, which may or
may not be included in working memory depending
on the degree of strength of individual memory traces.
Working memory is the place where any cognitive
processes should use for their operations, including
retrieval of relevant knowledge stored in working-
memory to place its result, matching between the
information from sensory memory and long-term
memory to place the result of comparison. This may
include pieces of declarative knowledge to be used to
comprehend what the musical score just having been
read, or pieces of procedural knowledge concerning
how to move his or her fingers in a coordinated way,
i,e, the patterns of muscle movements.
Long-term memory is a storage with infinite capac-
ity for declarative, procedural, and the other types of
knowledge. Reading musical score is not a process
of just reading as reading a printed book but a pro-
cess for associating what is read with how to move
his or her fingers, i.e., motor planning including co-
ordination of five fingers of right and left hands with
the degree of strengths of hitting the keyboards. This
is a very complex association process of visual infor-
mation with motor information, and the rules for as-
sociation must exist in long-term memory, or must be
available, and need to be activated via retrieval pro-
cess, or must be accessible, in order to be smoothly
played on the piano as indicated by the visually indi-
cated on the musical score.
2.2 Musical Score Reading Procedure
This subsection describes Fig.1 in more detail by ex-
tending the explanation given in the previous subsec-
tion.
The first step is to transfer external objects that
physically exist on musical score to internal memo-
ries to be cognitively processed as information for de-
termining next bodily actions to perform. Normally,
a person obtains physical features of symbols on mu-
sical score via his or her eyes, which are transmitted
to sensory memory, i.e., the visual image store, and
then some portion of the contents in the visual im-
age store is transferred to working memory and repre-
sented as symbols corresponding to the physical fea-
tures of the external objects. Symbols are manipu-
lated by the cognitive processes that follow to retrieve
relevant knowledge from long-term memory for the
Understanding Relationships between Reading Behavior and Difficulty Level of Musical Score based on Cognitive-behavioral Science -
Competency Level Evaluation via Musical Score Reading Processes
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