Either young people’s sight reading is much better than mine at a similar age, or the blue, moving cursor in Sibelius transports them into a free-style, space-time kind of reading similar to Guitar Hero. It could be that they’re not really sure which beat any given note (and especially syncopation) occupies and, in the context in which we do this, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

The context is this: before launching into the expense of ink and paper I like to run new arrangement ideas past a variety of pupils to gauge the likely reaction. This involves reading from a moving score on a laptop screen and playing only their line and ignoring the others - usually 3 but in the case which prompted me to consider this issue a little further there were another 6 lines.

It brought to mind a comment made by an architect friend some years ago when he described a new generation of practitioners seeing the representation of buildings in a completely new way. In the case of that particular profession, I think he meant that the view of a building was an amalgam of the part currently visible on screen and the parts recently seen and now in their working memory. Not an exact parallel, I’ll grant you, but thought provoking nonetheless.

Categories: Digital Literacy, Gaming, Music
Tags: , Sibelius, sight reading