Exploring the association between visual perception abilities and reading of musical notation

In the reading of music, the acquisition of pitch information depends primarily upon the spatial position of notes as well as upon an individual's spatial processing ability. This study investigated the relationship between the ability to read single notes and visual-spatial ability. Participants with high and low single-note reading abilities were differentiated based upon differences in musical notation-reading abilities and their spatial processing; object recognition abilities were then assessed. It was found that the group with lower note-reading abilities made more errors than did the group with a higher note-reading abilities in the mental rotation task. In contrast, there was no apparent significant difference between the two groups in the object recognition task. These results suggest that note-reading may be related to visual spatial processing abilities, and not to an individual's ability with object recognition.