Auditory Feedback and Musical Keyboard Performance

Abstract

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.

Auditory feedback in music performance: Evidence for a dissociation of sequencing and timing.

“…Moreover, Experiment 2 demonstrated disruption when pitch contents of auditory feedback were altered to match past produced events, which contrasts with past research, in which performance was unaffected by manipulations of feedback contents (Finney, 1997;Howell, 1983;Howell & Archer, 1984;Howell & Powell, 1987;Howell et al, 1983). Although other methodological differences may account for discrepancies between the present and past results, Experiment 2 nevertheless provides new evidence that alterations of feedback contents alone can disrupt performance.…”

“…The current manipulations differed from those used in past studies (e.g., Finney, 1997;Howell et al, 1983) in that both alterations resulted from calibrations of feedback timing at different levels of a single timing hierarchy via phase and period shifts. The finding of disruption from altered contents when these alterations result from period shifts, as opposed to randomized pitch contents (Finney, 1997), suggests that timing relationships do lie at the root of DAF disruption examined previously (cf. Finney & Warren, 2002;Howell et al, 1983) but that the scope of relevant timing relationships may be broader and more differentiated than originally considered.…”

“…This nonlinear relationship between similarity and disruption may also account for why randomizations of feedback contents do not disrupt production (e.g. Finney, 1997): Randomized pitches form an auditory pattern that is highly dissimilar from the planned sequence of events.…”

Auditory Feedback in Music Performance: The Role of Melodic Structure and Musical Skill.

“…One goal of the present experiments is to confirm that serial shifts disrupt production, in contrast with the negligible disruption that results from randomized pitches or feedback absence (Finney, 1997;Pfordresher, 2003a;Repp, 1999). Experiments 1 and 2 include these conditions in the same session with pianists and nonpianists, respectively.…”

“…A qualification of these results is that nondisruptive manipulations of feedback contents result in feedback pitches that are unrelated to planned pitches. For instance, Finney (1997) failed to find disruption of piano performance from a quasi-random mapping between piano keys and pitches. Howell and Archer (1984) likewise demonstrated that DAF disruption of speech was not qualitatively altered when feedback contents (phonemes) were converted to a square wave tone.…”