Seeing Sound: The Intersection of Music and Vision
Good vision plays a crucial role in being a successful musician, as it directly influences a musician’s ability to read sheet music, follow a conductor’s cues, and engage with an audience.
Musicians rely on their sight to interpret complex scores, make quick adjustments while performing, and maintain synchronization with other musicians. Moreover, good vision enhances a musician’s ability to observe subtle hand gestures or facial expressions that convey emotional nuances in a piece, allowing for a more expressive and accurate performance. In essence, clear vision not only supports technical precision but also enriches the emotional depth and connectivity of a musician’s craft, ultimately contributing to their overall artistry and success.
Vision problems like oculomotor disorder can impact a person’s ability to read or even play music. This disorder is frequently overlooked because it typically requires more in-depth visual evaluations for detection, leading to it being misdiagnosed as a behavioral or attention disorder.
Strong visual motor skills are essential for playing an instrument, as music demands precise eye-hand coordination. The eyes must communicate with the body to guide movements accurately to play the right notes.
Piano teacher Janice Cook (From Piano Teacher to Optometry Advocate) said, “I used to think, well, there’s a learning disorder here, or an attention deficit, or a behavior problem. Or maybe they’re auditory learners. Or maybe they’re just unintuitive or unmotivated. I have even wondered about my own ability to teach kids how to read music. I didn’t have a clue about different types of vision or vision processing problems.”
Janice Cook, Piano Teacher and Musician
These children aren’t lazy or untalented, their eyes have a correctable vision problem making these things more difficult for them.
This is what a reader with oculomotor disorder looks like.
With oculomotor dysfunction, eye movements are not controlled and the eyes aren’t working together. When eye coordination and eye teaming is not working on autopilot like it should, it takes extra concentration which depletes the brain’s ability to comprehend, learn, and maintain attention. When the brain gets overworked and tired from trying to concentrate on so many things just to complete a simple task, the person may act out or cope in a way that looks like an attention or behavior problem. Most of the symptoms of an oculomotor disorder resemble behavior or attention problems, as the eyes and brain negatively cope with their environment.
“We believe, along with other professionals who work with kids to help grasp and navigate the world around them, that teachers and anyone who really works alongside of children that it is important to look at their students’ behaviors through a health lens and push for more in-depth eye examinations that can cover more developmental steps or mis-steps that occur throughout one’s life than a regular eye exam covers.”
At Brighter Outlook Vision, our evaluations also assess the visual pathways that affect perception, attention, and memory. 87% of nerves that leave the eyes go to the occipital lobe- a feedforward pathway providing info to the rest of the sensory systems. 15% of nerves that leave the eyes go to the midbrain to prepare for preconscious processing and movement The Effects of Vision Dysfunction. This visual and muscular processing is very important in playing music.
Vision is not just seeing 20/20. Visual processing disorders occur when the brain has trouble making sense of the visual input it receives. Vision is the first step in development and learning what things are. The visual system is the neural software that enables us to take in info and integrate it to other systems.
In order to play music the eyes need to be able to read and process what note is played; therefore, the eyes can lead the way in visual learning and playing music. In order to read the music notes well enough to match vision with other sensory and muscular systems (auditory, vestibular), the eyes need to be able to do several things; there needs to be good eye movement control, near visual clarity, both eyes synchronized, accurate visual processing, and proper visual-sensory integration. With all this present, the brain can derive meaning from visual language symbols that relate to the auditory symbols (music or phonics) and visual memory is also created.
Janice gives several red flags to look for that correlates to a vision problem:
- A child not wanting to read out loud.
- A child who regularly acts out, changes the subject, acts silly or simply puts their head down as a way of deflecting when asked to sight read.
- A child who relies heavily on memorization because actually looking at a piece of music is just too hard.
It is important to prevent a child from experiencing the tragedy of being mislabeled because their full range of visual skills have not been evaluated. BOV offers in-depth vision and processing evaluations by our developmental optometrist who then will help put together a program that will help build that neural software that enables us to take in information and integrate it to be the best musician we can be, without a vision problem interfering.
