I’ve made another realization about my terrible, terrible approach to sight-reading all these years and am positively kicking myself! In my previous post, I talked about how wrong my perception was and how that inhibited my development of the ability to read at sight. Having always perceived sight-reading as a test for an exam rather than just another musical activity, I never allowed myself to develop an aptitude for it.

Now I’ve identified another problem. I was, quite simply, doing it the wrong way. I was looking at the notes printed on the page and trying to translate them into keys on a keyboard. This doesn’t work! Translating a visual presentation of music into another visual presentation of music is not the purpose of reading and it presents a tremendous amount of work to the brain. Imagine how completely impossible it would be to sing a tune at sight if that was the way to do it! We can’t see our vocal chords, after all. This method of reading music would only suit a deaf person, and that obviously makes no sense at all.

So what did I need to change? My interpretation of written music. Now I look at a piece of music and I translate it into sound in my mind first, i.e. hear it with my “internal ear”, as many teachers put it. Once I’ve done that, I simply use my familiarity with the keyboard to quickly find and play out those sounds.

The way I was trying to read music before just made no sense. I now realize that a skilled sight-reader is actually someone who first imagines what each bar sounds like and then allows their well-developed navigation of the keyboard (or whatever instrument he/she plays) to do the rest. This may have been an even more important realization than the previous one, so I guess my career and my enjoyment of music have both just received another boost!