# Sight-reading

Source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/sight-reading
Also known as: prima vista

**Sight-reading is playing a piece of music accurately on first sight, without having practised it beforehand.**

It is a pattern-recognition skill, not a decoding one. Fluent readers do not identify notes one at a time; they recognise scale fragments, arpeggio shapes, and rhythmic figures as whole units, the way a fluent reader of text sees words rather than letters. This is why theory study measurably improves sight-reading, knowing that a passage is a D major arpeggio replaces five decisions with one.

The practical technique is to scan before playing: check the key signature, the time signature, the tempo, the range, and any accidentals or clef changes, then keep going no matter what. Stopping to fix an error is the single habit that most reliably prevents sight-reading from improving, because reading is fundamentally the skill of continuing.

The best practice material is music slightly easier than what you can play, in large quantities, read once each and never repeated.

Canonical source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/sight-reading