Perception of a Comprovisation: The Ambiguity of Listening to a Composed Musical Piece Derived from Improvisational Material

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to reproduce and expand on some of the empirical experiments that have been used to address the aesthetics of listening to improvised music. We focus on a piece of music that we consider to be a comprovisation, a term used for music that is a blend of composition and improvisation. The responses offered by the participants in our experiment were somewhat ambiguous, as there was no clear consensus in regard to the suggested musical form or the quality of judgments about the compositional and improvisational aspects of the piece. The piece used for the empirical experiment was based on a free improvisation of two Brazilian musicians: Vinicius Dorin on soprano saxophone and Nenê on drums. The music was further reorganized (by means of digital audio edition) and orchestrated by American composer John Rapson. The final phonogram represents an interpretation of the composer’s improvisation, but it still reflects the improvisational characteristics of the primary material. Our method is based on Canonne’s (2018) empirical experiments, which departs from an analysis based on the grounded theory approach of multiple comparison. Our method is also based on the vision of the contextual information’s influence on subjective evaluations (Anglada-Tort, 2018). We separated the participants into musicians and non-musicians, and then divided them into three groups, giving each group a different informational context. Despite using a small sample of participants and a qualitative analysis, we believe that the results show how ambiguity can exist among listeners who are exposed to music without any context information. However, because this research is a first step, we cannot generalize the results. In the future, we believe that this kind of experiment could be expanded to confirm our primary data.