Reading Music Cold: The Art of Sight-Reading

Imagine someone hands you a map of a city you've never visited and says, 'Find the park — now.' You can do it because you know how maps work: symbols, scale, direction. Music notation is your map. Sight-reading means performing a piece of music you have never seen or heard before, decoding the notation in real time. Before you look at today's challenge passage, ask yourself: what information does a piece of written music give you before a single note is played?