Note-by-Note Music Reading: A Musician with Letter-by-Letter Reading

This paper reports the case of a musician suffering from letter-by-letter reading caused by a left posterior temporoparietal lesion. The patient also had difficulty in reading musical scores, although her expressive ability was intact. The time taken by the patient to read words and nonwords increased with the number of letters in the items. There was a similar increase in the time required to read music as the number of notes increased. Analogous to the text-reading model, two accesses (one global, the other step-by-step) to the representations of written notes are proposed.