Four years of sight reading practice

This is a really terrible way to learn sightreading.

I got to music college without really being able to read at all and turned it into a real strength to the extent that by my final year I was by far the best sight reader in the college on my instrument (I was a bass player so it's a relatively low bar, but I was even a good reader compared to many folks on other instruments). How I learned (and what I would recommend) is get yourself a truly massive pile of music for your instrument and get a metronome or drum machine app on your preferred device.

Then, every day (will take a few months to get good) pick a piece up from the pile, allow yourself a few seconds to check out the key and time signature, check for repeats etc so you know the basic structure and look for anything funky (odd bars, key changes etc). Set the metronome a little below the indicated tempo on the music (you can work up to sightreading fully up to speed), then start the metronome and immediately play it through without stopping as though you were doing a performance. Then put the music on the done pile, pick up the next piece and go back to the start.

So: Use real music. Play each piece once as though it was a performance. With a metronome/drum machine to keep you honest tempo-wise. In a few months you will get good at sightreading.

Once you're good start doing transcriptions of things you like. Doesn't need to be your instrument. Obviously this helps your ear but I found it also helped my sightreading. But it's not really worth doing until your basic sightreading chops are solid.

Yes the notes are in a random sequence. The "chords" appear to be chosen as major or minor triads, with random inversions or random "common intervals" like octaves, fifths and fourths, I don't think I've ever come across a tritone or "wierd" intervals.

I have gone through various phases in how it feels to play these random notes. Right at the beginning there is obviously the mechanical skill of just being able to put your fingers in the right place. This is less pronounced on piano than guitar, since single notes on the piano are obviously pretty easy for anyone. But when I switched to chords, I definitely felt the feeling I remember from learning the guitar, where the campfire chord shapes seemed to be just impossible to achieve with my fingers.

Keep in mind that this is not the only thing I'm doing to learn - I am also learning pieces, playing arpeggios and scales and studying music theory. Lately I've been gaining speed on the random notes by identifying runs and reading ahead a bit like you're describing.

I am quite proficient at guitar, played in a band and did a lot of pop music playing where you're handed a lyric sheet with chords and you have to just play. I can do that pretty much without prep. I can also "sight read" tablature for reasonably simple finger picking for novel songs quite a bit faster than I am able to do it on piano at the moment. I could never quite get there for traditional notation although I tried. I struggled to improve because once I knew the piece, I could play it without reading the music. So I would laboriously figure out the fingerings, then just play the piece from memory once I had done that. This was all happening in the early 1990s so I also didn't have the glut of music we would have now. Tablature was much more available for the pieces I wante to learn than traditional notation. I guess there is a mode where you force yourself to only learn new pieces all the time, but I found that pretty frustrating coming from zero.

I'm finding with piano, now that I have the notes in my fingers, that first step is much less frustrating and I can focus on building the mechanical dexterity to execute the phrases and remember the music.

Yes, I guess this is what self-taught looks like. Although I have seen the use of mnemonics to remember the order of things in many contexts in music, including formal teaching. I thought some of these were universal: FACE and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge for the note names on the staff, Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle, Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles' Father.

By this time I must admit that the random note playing is just an activity that I enjoy improving at independently, while I do think it's also making it easier for me to pick up new pieces quickly.

Thank you, I will look into it

These charts are serving a few purposes. First of all, it is motivating to me to see improvement. I can see for instance learning curve dropout when I skip practice, and knowing what a gap will look like on the chart motivates me to keep going. I also use the key-specific curves to choose keys to focus on, so that I don't keep going on the ones I know well. I'm planning to add some more visualisation to understand if there is a pattern to perhaps sharps or flats being harder, or if there is a sharp to flat transition effect which I suspect at the moment - after playing a few days where all the keys are sharps, it feels weird to move to flats.