Coordination and Consonance Between Interacting, Improvising Musicians

Abstract

Joint action (JA) is ubiquitous in our cognitive lives. From basketball teams to teams of surgeons, humans often coordinate with one another to achieve some common goal. Idealized laboratory studies of group behavior have begun to elucidate basic JA mechanisms, but little is understood about how these mechanisms scale up in more sophisticated and open-ended JA that occurs in the wild. We address this gap by examining coordination in a paragon domain for creative joint expression: improvising jazz musicians. Coordination in jazz music subserves an aesthetic goal: the generation of a collective musical expression comprising coherent, highly nuanced musical structure (e.g., rhythm, harmony). In our study, dyads of professional jazz pianists improvised in a “coupled,” mutually adaptive condition, and an “overdubbed” condition that precluded mutual adaptation, as occurs in common studio recording practices. Using a model of musical tonality, we quantify the flow of rhythmic and harmonic information between musicians as a function of interaction condition. Our analyses show that mutually adapting dyads achieve greater temporal alignment and produce more consonant harmonies. These musical signatures of coordination were preferred by independent improvisers and naive listeners, who gave higher quality ratings to coupled interactions despite being blind to condition. We present these results and discuss their implications for music technology and JA research more generally.

Tonal Emergence: An agent-based model of tonal coordination

“…Here we present TonalEmergence, an agent-based computational model of tonal coordination, which can help us gain traction on such mechanistic questions. The model is formulated to simulate the experimental conditions of Setzler and Goldstone (2020) (i.e., "coupled" and "one-way"), and to isolate the phenomena of tonal coordination from other musical dimensions that are unconstrained in free improvisation (e.g., rhythm, polyphony, texture/loudness). At each step of simulated time, agents generate a single note biased towards maximizing tonal consonance with their partners' previous notes.…”

“…Furthermore, once given some empirical validation, the intrinsic dynamics of TotalEmergence are worth studying for what they reveal about factors that affect coordination and (in)stability in a richly structured behavioral space. The simplicity of the model also allows us to go beyond the kinds of analyses reported in Setzler and Goldstone (2020), and to explore other aspects of emergent tonal structure that are difficult to operationalize in naturalistic music, which is complicated by rhythmic variations. Recall the performance of Taborn and Iyer, in which they spontaneously converge on tonal basins.…”

“…E. Walton, Richardson, Langland-Hassan, & Chemero, 2015). A growing body of empirical studies have begun to systematically elucidate the phenomenon of collective musical improvisation -how it is by implicitly guided by shared mental models (Canonne & Garnier, 2011), constrained by genre and performance context (A. E. Walton et al, 2018) and supported by feedback loops of mutual adaptation between interacting musicians (Setzler & Goldstone, 2020). In "free" jazz, improvising ensembles possess the uncanny ability to collectively generate novel musical expressions in real-time, without any written score, prior songform or explicit advance planning.…”

“…There is not one unambiguous leader; instead, "leadership" appears to be more or less evenly distributed between the two of them. Setzler and Goldstone (2020) contrasted the music produced by pairs of professional jazz pianists improvising in two interaction conditions: a "coupled" condition, in which both pianists improvised simultaneously and thus had to ability to mutually respond to one another, and a "one-way" (overdubbed) condition, in which a single pianist improvised along with a recording produced by an individual in a previous coupled trial. These interaction conditions were devised to experimentally control for mutual coupling between musicians -something that was present in coupled trials, but not in one-way trials, because there was only one possible direction of influence (i.e., from the recording to the live musician, but not the other way around).…”

multiSyncPy: A Python Package for Assessing Multivariate Coordination Dynamics

“…Past work on interpersonal coordination comprises a diverse body of work with investigations in general social interactions (Abney et al, 2015;Chanel et al, 2013;Louwerse et al, 2012), parent-child interactions (Abney et al, 2017;Crowell et al, 2017;Feldman, 2007;Nguyen et al, 2020), romantic partners (Butler & Barnard, 2019;Gottman, 2014;Randall et al, 2013;Timmons et al, 2015), families (Butner et al, 2018), strangers and friends (Bizzego et al, 2020;Galati et al, 2020), mental health-related interactions (Butner et al, 2017;Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011;Soma et al, 2019;Wiltshire, Philipsen, et al, 2020), teamwork (Dias et al, 2019;Likens et al, 2014;Palumbo et al, 2017;Reinero et al, 2020;Wiltshire et al, 2019), performance groups (Keller et al, 2014;Setzler & Goldstone, 2020), and even inter-species interactions (Wanser et al, 2021). In addition, there is evidence of synchronization phenomena in many modalities including non-verbal behaviors and movements (Ramseyer, 2019;Schoenherr et al, 2019), acoustic properties of speech (Fischer et al, 2017;Imel et al, 2014;Wieder & Wiltshire, 2020), alignment in language (Duran et al, 2019;Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016), physiological signals from the autonomic nervous system (Kleinbub, 2017; PYTHON PACKAGE FOR MULTIVARIATE SYNCHRONIZATION 5 2020; Konvalinka et al, 2011), and patterns of ...…”