Why do String Players Perform Easier per Memory than Wind Music Players? – Testing Instrumentalist Students’ Attention Levels During Music Reading

Developing music reading skills is considered a central part of music education. The knowledge of musical notation is essential to participate in orchestras or in choral ensembles. In musical practice, pianists who play as soloists with an orchestra do notneed written support as opposed to brass instrument soloists. Until now, no research has been conducted to discoverthe reasons why pianists and string players play easier by heart than brass instrument players.Music related activities involve numerous psychological processes, including perception and rapid processing of audio stimuli, attention and auditory, sensory and visual memory activation. Students with working memory impairments have difficulties with concentration as well as with organizing and monitoring the quality of their own work (Alloway et al., 2009).If the attention level is normal or high, the student is in an appropriate state for learning. It has been shown that participants with high working memory capacity perform significantly better on a variety of attention tasks (Fougnie, 2008).Attention supports the development of emerging reading skills by helping students regulate the cognitive demands inherently part of learning (Sáez et al., 2011).Thisstudy aims to test instrumentalist students’ attention and mediation levels during music reading by means of NeuroSky’s MindWave EEG device that translates brainwaves into digital information and beams it wirelessly to acomputer. We investigated 22right-handed wind instrumentalists, 12-14 years of age, and compared them with 21 violin players,matched for age and grade level. Students were asked to play an eight-bar composition bySzilvay. We analyzed attention and mediation levels, as well as alpha, beta and gamma band oscillatory responses to the musical piece during reading. The results of the data analysis were evaluated using e-Sense Metric. According to this metric, attention and meditation data arescaled between 1 and 100. The findings ofthe study revealed that the average attention level of the violin players was slightly highat61.53;while that of the wind players was 39.98, that is,slightly low. A significant difference was found between the averages of attention levelsbetween the string and the wind players (t=2.656, p=.026).With the use of EEG, the appearance of fatiguecan be detectedand the concentration levelscan be differentiatedfor the same exercise for different pupils. The results help us to improve instructionalmethods, and can also help us to reveal the processesof attention and mediation duringthe students’ music reading. Further research can involve the replication of the studywith pianists,comparing them with string players and wind music players. In an even more refined desing, a replication study could be carried out to compare pianists and brass instrument players. These further studies can serve as a basis for developing training programs of music reading comprehension for different instrumentalists.