Score design for music reading: Cognitive and artistic perspectives

The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce that it will host a new research project Score design for music reading: Cognitive and artistic perspectives, funded by a Leverhulme Trust project grant awarded to Emeritus Professor Ian Cross.  The project has several strands, one of which will investigate ways of making musical notation easier to read at sight.  Preliminary results (Stenberg & Cross, 2019) have already shown that it is possible to achieve this by means of simple yet effective modifications to standard notation, and these results will be followed up in a series of experiments using standard behavioural methods as well as eye-tracking.  The project will also evaluate how musicians interact with and use scores in practice, showing performers how they can reconfigure scores so as to reflect, and to help transmit, their own interpretations of the music.  It will be conducted by Professor Ian Cross ( Principal Investigator), Dr Arild Stenberg (Senior Research Associate) and Dr David Duncan (Research Assistant); a doctoral student will join the project in Easter Term 2023.  Though based in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, the project will also be carried out with the help of students and teachers at the Royal College of Music in London and the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles.