An ecological description of jazz improvisation.

Abstract

This paper builds on writings in psychology and philosophy to offer an “ecological” description of jazz improvisation. The description is grounded in the analogy of navigation through a complex environment, an environment that comprises the harmonic and metrical scheme on which the improvisation is based coupled with broader stylistic norms. The improvising soloist perceives this environment in terms of its “affordances,” that is, the possibilities for action that it offers (Gibson, 1979). While navigating the improvisational environment, the soloist also seeks opportunities for artistic display—motivic development, conspicuous risk-taking, and so on. Errors in improvisation reflect the soloist’s misperception of the environment’s affordances. Learning to improvise is a matter of refining perception through repeated experiences of improvisational success and failure. To bring the description to life, I offer evidence from an exploratory study of improvisational errors. The ecological description leads to new interpretations of the referent (the conceptual frame for a solo), improvisational learning and memory, and temporal coordination between soloist and ensemble. It counterbalances the prevailing computational view of improvisation, oriented around input, processing, and output.

Improvisation experience predicts how musicians categorize musical structures

“…This study assessed categorization on the basis of perceptual similarity. Given that our definition of musical function is tied to how a particular structure is used , the large and growing body of work on perception-action coupling in music (Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014; Novembre & Keller, 2014) and new promising work describing improvisation in terms of Gibsonian affordances (Love, 2017), it could be that motor areas are involved in representing such structures. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) RSA analysis could help show what representational brain activity corresponds to the perceptual similarity.…”

Between Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: Is There Resonance?

“…Furthermore, following Fuchs' use of the notion of "kinetic melodies" (which derives from Luria (1973) and has also been developed by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone ( 2011)), we can say that a jazz improvisor will deploy various learned motor gestalts and schemas to craft their particular improvisations. While there may be times when a musician decides to be more or less innovative and daring in their performance, any case of improvising will still fall back on at least some basic motoric components (e.g., a trumpet player must blow a certain way to create a sound and a pianist needs to shape their hands in certain ways to create chords).…”

The Improvisational State of Mind: A Multidisciplinary Study of an Improvisatory Approach to Classical Music Repertoire Performance

“…Most of the recent scientific investigations into musical improvisation have centered on jazz. These studies have analyzed improvisation using tools from neuroscience (Donnay et al, 2014 ; Pinho et al, 2014 ; Lopata et al, 2017 ), musicology (Norgaard, 2011 , 2014 ) and psychology (Tervaniemi et al, 2016 ; Love, 2017 ) Although these research efforts are relevant to broaden our understanding of improvisation in music, it is not straightforward how to isolate the effect of improvisation as there is no natural baseline to compare with. Improvisation is a fundamental and omnipresent ingredient in Jazz music and therefore is to be expected that Jazz musicians and listeners will have a preference for it.…”