Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Second sight

Could sight reading performance be improved with full (automatically generated and customized) fingerings? Or is this too much to process? Would full annotation affect look-ahead span a la Sloboda? How much annotation is ideal in a sight reading situation? Does this vary by individual? There is a literature on the subject of sight reading. Maybe I should (sight) read it.

What is the optimal amount of fingering annotation? How do editors currently decide what notes to annotate? Instead of aligning to the full annotations of performers, we could try to predict the partial annotations of editors. Ultimately we want to generate the most useful annotations. This implies determining both the correct fingerings and the ideal set of notes to be annotated. We could have a verbosity knob on the application, or the application could learn the player's preferred level of verbosity. Annotations could disappear from the displayed score, as the program determines they are note needed. They could reappear if the player falters. Would this drive the player nuts? Would they demand a static representation? Would they do this because that is what they are used to (because that is how paper works) or because this has inherent merit. Does this inherent merit, if it exists, apply only to performance situations, but not to a practice situations?

The idealized performance is memorized. As progress is made toward this ideal, should not fingering annotations gradually vanish? What about other annotations? What should disappear last--the notes, dynamic contours? Could practice for (memorized) performance benefit from this sort of reverse scaffolding?

Questions about the adequacy of editorial annotations should be included in our survey. What do the people think? Are the annotations useful even if they are ignored or crossed out? Pianists say they are at least some of the time (interpretation uber alles), but can this utility be measured?

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