Music performance with delayed auditory feedback: an embodied perspective

15 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION Music performance is a highly skilled human activity in which action and perception are tightly coupled. While playing music, if the primary brain area dedicated to mo- tor control activates, the auditory area activates too, and vice versa. Coupling of ac- tion and perception permits the musician to feel immersed in the environment, and to be able of modifying it to his or her taste just moving on the instrument. Such experi- ence of immersion strongly relies on sensory feedback, which contributes to the per- ception of the action-relevant values of the physical energies in the environment. In particular, auditory feedback has an important role in the matching of produced ac- tions and perceived ones. In fact, as many studies on delayed auditory feedback (DAF) report, alterations of auditory feedback timing that introduce asynchronies be- tween action and perception can profoundly impair performance, to the extent that musical execution may be interrupted: this phenomenon seems due to the need for congruency between what is produced and what is perceived. New technologies for music production are often affected by significant DAF, caus- ing the musical performance to become more difficult and unsatisfactory. Examples may be suites for network playing, in which the large communication distances pro- duce unavoidable latencies. This scenario calls for the search of useful techniques for playing music with DAF, overcoming the difficulties introduced by the mismatch be- tween action and perception. I will approach this problem from an ecological, em- bodied perspective, considering the role of human body as a mediator between the sonic energy in the environment and the inner world of the performer, made of inten- tions, meanings, and significations. In this chapter, I introduce music performance as one of the ultimate human motor skills (Paragraph 1.1), requiring high motor and cognitive capabilities, and strongly relying on sensory feedback (Subparagraph 1.1.1). Subparagraph 1.1.2 briefly pre- sents the cognitive view of music performance as a timed sequence of motor acts: according to this approach, research on feedback results central in understanding perception-action coupling mechanisms. In Paragraph 1.2, I discuss the role of feed- back in the execution of motor acts in general: open-loop and closed-loop models of motor control are presented. In Paragraph 1.3, I focus on the role of auditory feed-