Aspects of music performance that are most highly related to musical sophistication.

Abstract

Over the last 2 decades, 5 skills relating to visual (performing rehearsed music, sight-reading), aural (playing by ear, playing from memory), and creative (improvising) aspects of music performance have been defined and investigated. To date, however, there has been little research investigating the relationship between these 5 aspects of performance on general musicianship, and none using psychometric measures. The aim of this study was to empirically investigate this relationship through the use of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). With the exception of ‘Sight-reading,’ results show that all skills were correlated with musical sophistication, with the ‘Playing by Ear..