Reading ahead: keeping your eyes ahead of your hands

What reading ahead means

When you sight-read, your eyes and hands are never in the same place. The hands play what the eyes saw a moment ago, while the eyes are already taking in what comes next. The distance between them is called the eye-hand span. If it’s too short, every note is a surprise: you see it, then have to work out what it is and find it, all in the time you’re meant to be playing it. That’s where the hesitations, the stops at bar lines and the lost places come from.

What the research says

Psychologists have measured the eye-hand span by tracking musicians’ eyes as they sight-read, mostly with pianists, since the 1940s. A 2021 review of this research (Perra and colleagues, in the Journal of Eye Movement Research) draws together what the studies agree on. A few points are useful for anyone practising:

• The span is short. Usually around a second, and only rarely as much as a whole bar. Nobody is reading several bars ahead.
• Skilled readers fit more into it. Measured in notes, their span is longer on average. Measured in time, experts and less experienced players are much closer. The difference is how much they take in at a glance, not how far their eyes wander.
• It shrinks when the music gets harder. Complex music shortens everyone’s span, experts included, though a tricky spot coming up can draw the eyes towards it early.
• The best readers adapt. In one study, the strongest sight readers looked further ahead on easy music and closer in on hard music, rather than keeping a fixed distance.

What this means in practice: you can’t make your eyes look further by willpower. Reading ahead is something that happens when each note or chord costs you less effort to read. So the training has two halves: make reading itself quicker, and then practise using the time that frees up to look ahead.

Make the reading easier first

If you’re working out every note, your eyes have to stay with the note you’re working out. Anything that speeds up recognition gives the eyes room to move on:

• Know your notes instantly. Hesitating on note names pins your eyes to the present. Daily note drills, landmarks first, help more than anything. See landmark notes.
• Read on easier music. Your span is longest on music that’s easy for you, so that’s where to practise looking ahead.
• Slow down. A slower tempo gives the same number of notes more time, which is time to look ahead.

Read in chunks

A fluent reader of words doesn’t read letters; they read words, and often several at once. Music works the same way. Instead of seeing four separate notes, see “a C major chord broken upwards” or “a scale down to G”. A chunk takes about as long to take in as a single note, so the more you read in chunks, the more music fits in your span. Practise noticing them:

• Chords as shapes: three notes on lines or three on spaces, read from the bottom note.
• Lines as steps and skips: read the first note and the direction, not every note’s name.
• Rhythms as whole beats: “long-short-short” is one thing to read, not three.
• Patterns that repeat: an accompaniment that comes back is read once and then only checked.

Exercises that train reading ahead

1. The cover card. Ask someone to slide a card along the music just behind your eyes, covering each note as you’re about to play it, or do it yourself with your free hand on one-hand pieces. To keep playing, you have to have read the covered notes already. Start very easy and slow.
2. Look on the long notes. Whenever you hold a long note or a rest, move your eyes on to the next bar. These are the moments good readers use to read ahead, and you can make it a habit.
3. Look at the bar line early. Before you reach the end of a bar, your eyes should already be across the bar line. Practise saying the first note of the next bar out loud while playing the last beat of this one.
4. Read, then look away. Look at one bar for a few seconds, then look away and play it from memory. Then try two bars. It builds the habit of taking in a group of notes at once.
5. Keep a steady metronome. With a beat that doesn’t wait for you, looking ahead stops being optional. Choose a tempo slow enough that you can keep going.

The reading-ahead cover in Pianomi

Pianomi turns the cover card into a path. A cover travels with the cursor, hiding the note you’re about to play and the music just after it, so by the time you play a note it’s already hidden. The notes behind you and further ahead stay visible, and the cover lifts when the piece ends so you can check what you played.

The path has eight stages. The cover starts at one beat, grows to two beats, three beats and finally a whole bar. Each length comes first on pieces three levels below the one you’re on, so the reading is easy and the only new thing is looking ahead, and then on pieces just below your level. It opens once you reach sight-reading level 4, when you have enough reading to look ahead with.

How you’ll know it’s working

You’ll stop noticing bar lines. Pieces will feel less like a series of decisions and more like a line. You’ll catch key changes, clef changes and accidentals before they catch you. And when you do make a mistake, you’ll find it easier to keep going, because you already know what’s coming next.

Reading ahead is one part of sight reading; the sight-reading guide covers the rest. For plenty of easy music to practise looking ahead on, try the free sight-reading exercises.

Source: Perra, J., Poulin-Charronnat, B., Baccino, T. and Drai-Zerbib, V. (2021). Review on eye-hand span in sight-reading of music. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 14(4). doi:10.16910/jemr.14.4.4