2.1. Participants

Fifty-seven participants with no prior violin playing experience and no musical experience with other instruments (34 female and 23 male) were recruited from the Pompeu Fabra University campus to participate in the study. In addition, 15 expert violinists [EG; 8 women, 7 men; mean age: 32.4 (10.06); mean years experience: 18.6 (5.53)] were recruited from both the university campus and different music schools and conservatories in Barcelona. Participants conceded their written consent and procedures were approved by the Conservatoires UK Research Ethics committee on 04/04/2017, following the guidelines of the British Psychological Society.

Participants filled a questionnaire about their musical skills, main instrument, and years of music training. They also performed a pitch discrimination task (PDT) before (pre) and after (post) the experiment (Musicianbrain, 2021). Those participants who got pitch discrimination thresholds above 18 Hz in both pre and post-tests were asked to realize the Brams Online Test for musical abilities (Peretz et al., 2008). Those participants who got scores below 70% in both the first and third sections of the Brams test were labeled as “possible amusics” and removed from the experiment. We discarded one participant who reported after the experiment being unable to take pleasure in music. She also failed the first block from the Amusia test. Finally, we also discarded all the participants who reported having played a musical instrument for more than 1 year.

Beginner participants were randomly divided into three different experimental groups: the Feedback Group [FG; 9 female, 6 male; mean age: 27.93 (4.33)], the Control Group [CG; 11 female, 4 male; mean age: 27.83 (4.95)], and the Equal Timbre Group [ETG; 10 female, 7 male; mean age: 30.76(8.3)]. The study was carried out in the recording studio located in the Information and Communication Technologies Engineering (ETIC) department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.