Western music improvisers learn to realize chord symbols in multiple ways according to functional classifications, and practice making substitutions of these realizations accordingly. In contrast, Western classical musicians read music that specifies particular realizations so that they rarely make such functional substitutions. We advance a theory that experienced improvisers more readily perceive musical structures with similar functions as sounding similar by virtue of this categorization, and that this categorization partly enables the ability to improvise by allowing performers to make substitutions. We tested this with an oddball task while recording electroencephalography. In the task, a repeating standard chord progression was randomly interspersed with two kinds of deviants: one in which one of the chords was substituted with a chord from the same functional class (“exemplar deviant”), and one in which the substitution was outside the functional class (“function deviant”). For function compared to exemplar deviants, participants with more improvisation experience responded more quickly and accurately and had more discriminable N2c and P3b ERP components. Further, N2c and P3b signal discriminability predicted participants’ behavioral ability to discriminate the stimuli. Our research contributes to the cognitive science of creativity through identifying differences in knowledge organization as a trait that facilitates creative ability.
Despite often being conceived as a spontaneous and creative mode of performance, improvisation is predicated on prior knowledge. What characterizes this knowledge, and how is it represented or recalled differently a.s compared with other modes of music making? Asking about knowledge and trying to distinguish improvisation as a distinct performance process can locate research questions within the theoretical frameworks of cognitive science, but it is not clear how to make such questions experimentally accessible. Differences arising from music-analytical versus cognitive conceptions of improvisation are explored to provide a theoretical framework compatible with experimentation. Experimental research could concern itself with how the embodied interface between performer and instrument, when manipulated, invokes different cognitive processes of music making, helping to describe the cognitive characteristics of various modes of music performance. Here, an experiment is reported that synthesizes previous techniques used to analyze improvisations with experimental strategies from the neuroscientific literature aimed at differentiating performance processes within a given improviser. Jazz pianists improvised monophonically over backing tracks in a familiar and unfamiliar key as well as with their right and left hands. Among other findings, in some of the less familiar performance situations, participants relied more on diatonic pitches and produced more predictable improvisations a.s measured by entropy and conditional entropy. The nature of the different underlying processes and knowledge at play under these different conditions is explored, and future research directions to better describe them are identified, including incorporating motor theories of perception.
This paper proposes a theory of improvisation as a way of knowing. Different musicians may know about similar musical structures in different ways; different ways of knowing facilitate particular kinds of perception and cognition that underlie different performance behaviors. Some of these ways of knowing can facilitate improvisatory performance practices. The details of these improvisatory ways of knowing can be characterized by psychological and neuroscientific experimental work that compares differences in perception and cognition between groups of musicians depending on their training methods and performance experiences. In particular, perception-action coupling is a promising place to begin making such comparisons. This approach provides an alternative operationalization of improvisation for scientific study that is not susceptible to the problems that arise when describing cognitive processes in culturally contingent and music-theoretically relative terms such as novelty, spontaneity, and freedom, as past experimental work has done. Its hypotheses are also more readily falsifiable. This perspective can also connect an understanding of musical improvisation to other domains of improvisation and to historical and ethnomusicological work, as well as square it with more general theories in cognitive science, such as perception-action coupling. Finally, such a formulation has productive implications for work on improvisation thatdoesengage with concepts like novelty, spontaneity, and freedom that are traditionally invoked in improvisation discourse.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.