Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research in human behavioral dynamics has demonstrated that co-actors often successfully achieve jointgoals by adopting functionally asymmetric patterns of behavior. To better understand the evolution of such patterns in anaturalistic musical context, the current study examined how auditory-feedback delays and individual musical roles affectcollective temporal stability and relative adaptability during duet performance. The delays between pianists were short (10-40 ms), bidirectional, and remained constant during a single trial, simulating those typical in internet-mediated performance.Preliminary results show increasingly reduced collective stability for longer delays along with a distinct pattern of asynchroniesacross the points where temporal synchrony would be expected, in which individuals exhibited consistent alternation betweenplaying before or after their co-performer. Furthermore, asynchronies became greater when the two musical parts were lesssimilar. Thus, emerging coordinative dynamics appear to be shaped both by asymmetries in co-performers’ assigned roles andexternal constraints on shared information.