Impinging jets are encountered in many industrial applications and suppression of the noise generated by these jets is of great fundamental and practical interest. The vortex dynamics and the interaction between the vortical structures and the impinging wall should be understood in order to control the aero-acoustic coupling between shear layer oscillation and the acoustic modes (self-sustained tones). In this study, a plane jet issuing from a rectangular nozzle and impinging on a plate is considered for Re= 3900. The sound pressure, the vibration of the impinged plate and the spatial velocity field are obtained simultaneously using a microphone, an accelerometer and the time-resolved particle image velocimetry technique, respectively. Spectra and cross-correlations are used to educe the role of different vortical structures leading to the aero-acoustic coupling. The results show the evolution of the correlation between acoustic and transverse velocity fields in the longitudinal direction. A pre-whitening technique is used to investigate the coupling between the acoustic and the velocity signals. This method shows that the correlation between the two signals has a centred peak that is not directly related to the passage of the dominant Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices.