How a Musical Misprint Led to a Named Psychological Phenomenon by Thomas Wolf
If you Google the words Goldovsky error, you will find many references to the term. Read a few and you will get the gist. A Goldovsky error is a psychological phenomenon that is as common in real life as it is counter-intuitive since one generally expects experts to find errors. But Goldovsky errors are found and correctly identified most often by non-experts, sometimes children. Here is a definition:
There are special types of mistakes or errors called Goldovsky errors that can only be easily spotted by inexperienced people in a field of study. In fact, the better you get at a skill, whether it is music, accounting, cooking, or chemistry, the harder it gets for you to spot a Goldovsky error but a new student would see it in a few seconds.[i]
In 2009, Joseph Hallinan published a book in which Goldovsky errors were included. The book, called Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average[ii]is an elaboration of an op ed piece by the author in the New York Times a few years prior giving “Goldovsky errors” pride of place.[iii]
In his article, Hallinan cited many examples. Several involved children finding errors that experts and other adults had missed:
In 2009, for instance, a first grader in Virginia noticed that a popular library book depicted a meat-eating dinosaur as an herbivore. A year before that, a fifth grader from Michigan discovered an error at a Smithsonian exhibit that had gone undetected for 27 years.
Waltteri Seretin, the Finnish boy who noticed that the image purported to be a Russian submarine that had been distributed by Reuter was actually a film clip from the movie “Titanic.”
And in 2007, another error was caught, this time by a 13-year old boy in Finland. The mistake involved an image of a submarine that a Russian TV company had used to illustrate a report about a Russian submarine voyage to the Arctic. The image, distributed by Reuters, was used by news outlets around the world. No one noticed anything awry. But the boy, Waltteri Seretin, did. The sub, he thought, looked suspiciously familiar. His suspicions were right: it was a film clip taken from the movie “Titanic.”
It is not only children that notice mistakes that millions of others miss as was the case in the Smithsonian example. Such missed errors can be noticed by adults too, but more often than not, it would be adults who have limited experience or knowledge of what is erroneously presented. Why should that be?
Experts (or people with familiarity) use what is known as higher order processing skills. These skills allow them to scan something quickly, picking up a few clues, and deciding the whole of what is being presented with very limited information rather than attempting to analyze every detail. Our brains are wired this way so that we can make our way through our complicated world without becoming exhausted or frustrated by breaking down every stimulus into its component parts. Clues that suggest familiar patterns allow us to accept a part for the whole. This is the way we read words, for example, which is why proof reading is so challenging (we miss individual letters that don’t belong). Careful scans of eye movements suggest it is even the way we read whole sentences (we don’t actually read every word) or scan paragraphs for meaning.
A peculiar case in the literature recounts a situation of a woman who hanged herself one October night from a tree on a busy street. Her body hung about fifteen feet above the ground and could be easily seen. Yet it was not until 11 a.m. the next morning that anyone contacted the authorities. Apparently, many assumed it was simply another Halloween decoration given the time of year. (NOTE: I have intentionally planted a Goldovsky error in the second half of this article. Can you find it?)
So how did this phenomenon come to be described as a “Goldovsky error,” named as it turns out for my uncle Boris Goldovsky who was a musician, not a psychologist. The story is a somewhat involuted one that goes back to 1971. I was a first-year graduate student at Harvard and had signed up for a psychology course called “Attentional Processes,” taught by my favorite professor, Sheldon White. Somewhat earlier in the year, my uncle told me his opera company had lost its company manager for a five-week tour of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and wondered whether I would be willing to take on the job. While procrastinating given the fact that I was a full-time student, he sweetened the offer saying I could also play flute in the orchestra, thereby collecting two salaries. Since I needed money to pay for graduate school, I decided to say yes, figuring that with one of those tour weeks being Harvard vacation, I could make up the remaining four weeks of classwork by catching up on reading and leaning on fellow students to crib their class notes. For three of my classes, the plan worked out just fine. But for White’s course, I realized I was in trouble. Class notes from that course were like Greek to me, much of the reading was impenetrable, and I became somewhat panicked.
Fortunately, one of the students pointed out two journal articles. “If you don’t read anything else, read these two,” she said. “They are seminal papers and are easy to understand. There’s no exam only a paper for the final so maybe you can figure out a topic to write about from these.” I dutifully searched out the articles.
George Armitage Miller (1920-2012), often referred to as the father of the cognitive revolution in psychology, whose seminal paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” established experimentally the limit of information we can process at any one time.
The first was by a psychologist named George Armitage Miller entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”[iv] The title was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and the article was much less complicated than it sounded. In it, Miller proved experimentally that though we think we can perceive and understand myriad amounts of information at any one time, in fact, the limit of our capacity for information at any one time is approximately seven units—a tiny number. There may be dozens of trees in our visual field, but if we start trying to remember each one, we lose the first tree image after about 20 seconds (the duration of short-term memory) and during that time we can only hold roughly six other specific tree images in our minds. As to sitting down with a book, we cannot explain even moderately-paced reading if our perceptual model is based on the idea that we are discerning every letter of every word.
Then came the clincher: according to Miller, we are not passive receivers of information. We are actively forming hypothesis about what we see, hear, feel, and take on through all of our senses, constantly forming conclusions based on very limited clues. We then “chunk” these units of information into hypotheses about what we are experiencing and more often than not, those hypotheses turn out to be right. In the case of the trees, as we look at the panorama, we hypothesize that all those individual trees are a forest (one chunk of information)—or perhaps something more complex, like “a pine forest” or “a forest during winter with snow and leafless trees” (both still only one information chunk).
Little did I know at the time that Miller’s paper was one of the most important in the history of psychology and helped launch the cognitive revolution in the field. What I did know is that it was fascinating and seemed to make sense. I couldn’t wait to delve into the second article that was, in some ways, even more fascinating than Miller’s, because the research dealt with real life examples and people.
Written by Herbert Simon and M. Barenfeld,[v] it considered the problem-solving strategies of chess players and focused on three questions:
First, how do skilled chess players perceive (or “read”) board positions from actual game situations?
Second, how do they store that information accurately enough to reproduce a complete board from memory?
And finally, why is a chess grand master not much better than a beginner in reproducing a board from memory when the pieces are arranged randomly?
Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), a psychologist whose seminal paper on the abilities of skilled chess players to recreate game board from memory led to speculations about musical sight reading and the discovery of the Goldovsky error.
Simon and Barenfeld photographed the eye movements of chess players during the first 15 seconds after new board situations from actual games had been presented to them. During that interval, expert players did not appear to be planning the next move but rather assessing the board as a whole. During the first 15 seconds after a new position was presented to them, skilled players were occupied with gathering familiar information about the patterns on the board. Having matched these few patterns with game positions stored in long-term memory, it was easy for them to recreate every piece on the board in its exact positions after the pieces had been removed. This is something beginners cannot do. It is simply too much information to memorize if every piece’s position has to be stored in memory. It was as Miller predicted. For the experts, pattern recognition allowed chunking of information. But when pieces were placed randomly on the board, even chess masters were stymied. There were no familiar patterns. They too failed to recreate the pieces in precise positions in those cases.
It did not take me long to think about a perfect topic for my paper—the processes involved in musical sight reading—that is, playing an unfamiliar piece from printed music that one is seeing for the first time. I was and am a terrible sight reader and having assumed it had to do with musical skill, I was puzzled. I knew I was a pretty good musician (indeed, I had been selected to play as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra just a couple of years before). But I was perplexed why my sight reading was so bad. These articles had explained it. I simply was unskilled at the pattern recognition required in reading unfamiliar printed music quickly—I was attempting to read note by note.
One thing led to another. I conducted an experiment with actual professional musicians, giving them classical music to sight read. Some could do it flawlessly. Others, not. When speaking to the skilled sight-readers about the process, they spoke constantly about recognizing familiar patterns—chord progressions, scales, cadences coming on first beats of measures, and so on. They also spoke, as Miller did, about the fact that they were actively creating a sense of where the music was going, predicting what came next, not passively trying to keep up with what was on the page. They picked up their clues in different ways—for one it was familiar patterns of notes on the printed page, for another auditory clues predominated, and for one the clues were tactile (“my hand just knew what the rest of the passage was going to be”). It didn’t seem to matter how they formed their hypotheses, just that all were active detectives forming impressions about what was coming.
But interestingly, when I put contemporary atonal music on the music stand—music that lacked patterns that were as familiar to the musicians—all of them fell down in their sight-reading abilities. It was the same as in the chess example. The grand masters, unable to see familiar patterns, could not recreate the arbitrarily arranged chess board from memory given the limited ability of the brain to hold many pieces of random information. So too with skilled sight-readers who were reduced to reading the music note-by-note.
One of the individuals who was a good sight reader was my pianist uncle, Boris Goldovsky. We discussed my findings and he confirmed that people who have trouble sight reading admit that they are trying to read all the notes. But ironically, he added, note-by-note readers are much better at finding mistakes in the printed music and he told me the following story:
“You are playing the wrong note,” said Boris Goldovsky to his student. But to his surprise, she was playing a misprinted note that neither the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, nor scores of pianists, had ever caught.
Some years before, a student who he described as a “technically competent pianist but a poor sight-reader” prepared a Brahms "Capriccio" (opus 76, No. 2) which she brought to her lesson. She began to play the piece through but when she arrived at the C sharp major chord on the first beat of the bar that is 42 measures from the end, she played a G natural instead of the G# which would normally occur in the C# major triad. Goldovsky told her to stop and correct her mistake. The student looked confused and said that she had played what was written. To Goldovsky's surprise, the girl had played the printed notes correctly—there was an apparent misprint in the music. At first, student and teacher believed that this was merely a misprint in the edition they were using but upon further checking they found that all other editions contained the same incorrect note. Why, mused Goldovsky, had no one, including the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, and scores of pianists, ever caught the mistake? From contextual clues it is clear that a G# is the only note that Brahms could possibly have intended; given the tonal style of the music, the pattern established in the previous measures, and the sequence of chords, no other reading is possible. Certainly, the reason that countless skilled musicians had never found the mistake was because they were reading musical patterns rather than individual notes.[vi]
I wrote up my findings and passed in the paper with some sense of relief that I had managed to squeak through a near crisis in my academic career when to my surprise, Professor White said the findings were important enough that I should submit the paper to an academic journal. It was later accepted for publication[vii] and for some reason, Uncle Boris’ story about the misreading of the note in the Brahms “Capriccio” captured the fancy of many readers who over the years immortalized the student’s mistake and ones like it as “Goldovsky errors.” And so they have been called ever since.
[i] Mental Model: Goldovsky Errors (joshuakennon.com) (accessed March 23, 2022)
[ii] See especially, Hallinan, Joseph, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, New York: Broadwat Books, 2009, pp. 111-112
[iii] Hallinan, Joseph, The Young and the Perceptive,” New York Times, March 5, 2011
[iv] Miller, G. A. (1956). The magic number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. PsychoL Rev. 63: 81-97.
[v] Simon, It. A., and Barenfeld, M. (1969). Information-processing analysis of perceptual processes in problem solving. PsychoL Rev. 76: 473-483.
[vi] Wolf, Thomas, “A Cognitive Model of Musical Sight-Reading,” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1976, p. 168.
[vii] ibid