The effect of breath awareness and practices on students' sight-reading skills in piano education

This study was conducted to examine the effect of breath awareness and practices on students' sight-reading skills in piano education. A quantitative approach was adopted, and an experimental design with a single-group pretest-posttest model was implemented. The study group consisted of eight piano major students enrolled in the Music Education Department at Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University. Two equivalent piano pieces were given to the participants before and after the intervention; performances were video recorded and analyzed based on expert evaluations using the "Participant Observation Form for Sight-Reading Assessment," which was developed by the researcher. Following the collection of pretest sight-reading recordings, participants regularly practiced eight different breath exercises over a three-month period. The findings revealed that breath practices had a positive effect on sight-reading performance, particularly in the items "playing with correct technique" and "applying dynamics," where improvement was observed in 6 out of 8 participants. However, in the items "playing notes correctly," "avoiding tempo fluctuations," and "sight-reading at a slow tempo without considering the actual tempo," this improvement was not consistently observed across all participants. This may be due to the fact that these items require technical skills and competencies specific to piano playing. Based on score rankings, only 4 participants—Participant 1, Participant 8, Participant 6 and Participant 10—showed improvement in six or more items out of the ten-item scale. The results suggest that breath awareness practices may support improvement in attention, technical control, and musical expression in some individuals; however, they do not demonstrate a generalizable effect.