Towards a dynamic model of skills involved in sight reading music

Sight reading is a functional skill which is essential for all musicians involved in particular fields of western classical music culture. In the last decade, expertise theory has shown that time spent on activities is a good predictor for later achievement in a domain. However, this study is based on the hypothesis that general and elementary cognitive skills as well as practice-related skills must be considered in the explanation of outstanding sight-reading achievement. Different component skills involved in sight reading were attributed to one of three categories: (a) general cognitive skills (working memory, short-term music memory, short-term numerical memory, and Raven's D Matrices); (b) elementary cognitive skills (speed tapping, simple reaction time, trilling speed, and speed of information processing); (c) practice-related skills (practicing solo, sight reading, and inner hearing skills). This resulted in a total set of 23 predictors. These tests were used to evaluate the potential correlates of...