Audiovisual interactions in music reading. A reaction times and event-related potentials study

The general aim of this experiment was to investigate the processes involved in reading musical notation and to study the relationship between written music and its auditory representation. Our main interest was to determine if musicians can develop expectancies for plausible or implausible auditory events on the sole basis of the visual score. Results showed that musicians can clearly expect auditory endings on the basis of visual information. These findings enliven the discussion on the question of whether music reading is actually music perception.