Eye movement in prima vista singing and vocal text reading

Abstract: An eye-tracking device was used in this pilot study to measure eye movement during prima vista singing and reading aloud. The common term eye-voice span is questioned, and a new terminology is proposed for the description of relations between attention, point of fixation and vocal performance. The temporal distance between the point of fixation and the vocal performance was measured and proved to be larger in vocal language reading than in musical sightreading. This distance is also related to the eye-voice span and the span of the window paradigm. Regressive saccades were found to be less frequent than expected from previous research on silent language reading and music sightreading. It is suggested that the difference depends on obscure definitions of the term regression. Furthermore, a sheet displaying both text and notes was used to study the distribution of attention between text and notes, showing that attention was almost equally shared.