Auditory Feedback and Musical Keyboard Performance

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.