Eye-voice lag when reading aloud and singing prima vista

Berseus, Per and Holmqvist, Kenneth
Department of Cognitive Science, Lund University
f96pb@efd.lth.se, kenneth@lucs.lu.se

This study examines the eye-voice lag when texts are read aloud and music is sung aloud. Fifteen experienced choir singers were each presented with three stimuli: a pure text, a music score with text and a music score without text. Subjects were asked to speak and to sing aloud, respectively, while their eye-movements and voice were recorded onto video via an SMI iView 50 Hz remote eyetracker. The eye-voice lag was analysed manually from video using Adobe Premiere 6.0.

During pure text reading, our data show that subjects exhibited an eye-voice lag of 750 ms on average, significantly longer than the average of 500 ms while singing without text (p = 0.011 in a two-sided t-test). Our data can be compared to the eye-voice lag in other modalities, such as describing simple pictures, about 800 ms (Meyer 2001) and complex pictures, about 2500 ms (Holsanova 2001).

When processing music scores with text, our subjects had to divide their attention between notes and text in order to collect both before singing the combination of the two. Information from each modality was collected for on average 2.9 fixations or 735 ms (sd = 0.9 fixations or 228 ms) before turning to the other modality.

Both these results measure processing buffers. The shorter eye-voice lag during singing indicates that the internal processing buffer does not host more musical information than is taken in during 500 ms, while the buffer takes linguistic information corresponding to 750 ms.