Abstract
We examined K. M., an amateur shakuhachi player who was also experienced at playing the piano. K. M. had been very adept at reading and writing stave notation as well as shakuhachi notation, but a subarachnoid hemorrhage selectively damaged his ability to read and write these two notations, with his ability to read and write stave notation more severely damaged than his ability to read and write shakuhachi notation. This discrepancy was apparent after K. M. listened to some well-known melodies. Whereas music can be written precisely using stave notation, manipulation of the shakuhachi instrument is written in shakuhachi notation by means of kana.
Japanese music differs from Western music in that the notes in a notation are sung in appropriate rhythm when learning to play Japanese instruments. This is called “shofu”. With the shakuhachi, the role of the notation is to help memory retrieval regarding finger placement, which is learned by shofu. K. M. was better able to retain his reading and writing ability for well-known melodies using shakuhachi notation than his reading and writing ability using stave notation.
These results suggest that K. M. retrieved correct answers from memory which came from using shofu, suggesting that the characteristic of shakuhachi notation plays a stronger role in memory retrieval than that of stave notation in the ability to read and write music.
