Looking into the eyes of a conductor performing Lerdahl's “Time after Time”

Abstract

The eye movements of a conductor were tracked during a performance of Lerdahl's “Time after time”. The analysis of the data revealed that, for most of the time, the conductor was looking at the score, rather than the performers. Most of the score-reading was in anticipation of the music to be played. Micro- and macro-anticipations could be defined, the former being between 2 to 5 seconds in advance, the later being more than 5 seconds in advance. The largest visual anticipations were as long as 10 seconds. The longer anticipations were found to correspond to the occurrence of those thematic cells the conductor considered to be of expressive importance for the piece. This suggests that the conductor's eye movements were governed on a small scale by the coordination of instrumental performance and on the large scale by his musical conception of the piece.