This research is carried out with the aim to develop assistive
technology that helps users following the beat in music, which is of
interest to cohchlear implant users. The envisioned technology would
use tactile feedback on each musical beat. However, this raises
fundamental questions about uni- and cross-modal perception which
are not addressed in similar context in the literature. The aim of this
study was i) to find out how well users are able to follow tactile
pulses. ii) To gain insights in the differences between auditory,
tactile and combined auditory-tactile feedback. A tapping experiment
was organized with 27 subjects. They were requested to tap along
with an auditory pulse, a tactile pulse and a combined auditory-tactile
pulse in three different tempi. An evaluation with respect to
regularity and asynchrony followed. Subjects were found to perform
significantly better in terms of reqularity and asynchrony for the
auditory and auditory/tactile condition with respect to the tactile only
condition. Mean negative asynchrony (MNA) for auditory and
combined (auditory and tactile) conditions were in the range of
previous studies. The MNA’s for the tactile conditions showed a
remarkable dependence on tempo. In the 90BPM condition a clear
anticipation (-20ms) was reported, for the 120BPM condition the
mean was around zero, the 150BPM condition showed a positive
MNA (a reaction vs anticipation). An effect that could be
encorporated into the design of an assistive technology
