In an investigation into the role of auditory feedback guidance in musical performance, musically experienced subjects performed on an electronic keyboard under altered feedback conditions that included pitch and timing manipulations, as well as absence of auditory feedback. The results largely replicated the data reported by Gates and Bradshaw (1974): performance in the absence of auditory feedback showed no impairment, whereas performance under delayed auditory feedback showed significant impairment. In an extension of the Gates and Bradshaw study, however, it was found that altered pitch feedback caused little or no impairment and that altering the pitches in the delayed auditory feedback condition significantly reduced the amount of delayed auditory feedback impairment. These results show that different components of auditory feedback (pitch and timing) have separable effects on musical performance and pose a problem for theories of auditory feedback effects that do not explicitly distinguish these components.

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Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) impairs performance in speech, music, and tapping, with maximal impairment in speech occurring at a delay of about 200 msec. This critical interval has played a central role in many explanations of the DAF effect, including both closed-loop feedback explanations and alternative proposals. We investigated the nature of the critical interval in rhythmic tapping-in particular, whether the critical interval has a constant value or is dependent on performance rate. Three experiments in which a synchronization-continuation paradigm was used consistently showed that the critical interval shifted with different tapping rates, with maximal impairment occurring when the delay approximately equaled the tapping rate. We address the implications of these results for theories of DAF.