Towards a standard model of musical improvisation

Abstract

Musical improvisation is a sophisticated cognitive process that combines creativity, goal‐directed action, sensory monitoring and social interaction. With a renewed interest in quantifying creative processes facilitated by recent advances in neuroimaging technology, musical improvisation has emerged as an ideal paradigm to study creativity. However, many studies isolate the top‐down processes related to creativity from those related to production and auditory perception, leaving the question of how creative behaviours integrate sensory information with higher cognitive processes unanswered. The bottom‐up neural correlates of music perception have been extensively quantified, comprising networks for auditory processing and parsing semantic and syntactic content. In studies of spontaneously generated music and domain‐general creativity, executive control and goal‐directed movement networks are added to the perceptual foundation. This review summarises previous work on music perception and improvisation and presents a conceptual model of musical improvisation with known neural correlates. We make recommendations on future directions for the study of improvisation and discuss the challenges posed by this endeavour.

Enhanced White Matter Fiber Tracts in Advanced Jazz Improvisers

“…Recent neuroimaging studies on musical improvisation have identified brain regions and networks involved in musical improvisation and other creative domains such as literacy and drawing. As reviewed in contemporary literature [1][2][3], variations in brain activity and connectivity may be related to the heterogeneity of the participant's background, their learned skills, experience, and creative expertise. In a recent neuroimaging study of advanced jazz musicians, we explored the divergent brain activation and connectivity patterns during musical improvisation and non-improvisation tasks.…”

Creatividad, improvisación y entrenamiento musical: una revisión sistemática

“…Esta produciría una preferencia ante estímulos inesperados que puede ser un factor determinante del desempeño creativo de un sujeto (Przsysinda et al, 2017). Estos hallazgos suman evidencia a la idea de que analizar la improvisación musical es sumamente útil para el estudio de la creatividad humana (Biasutti, 2015;Faber y McIntosh, 2020).…”

“…La improvisación musical involucra procesos creativos, pero no es sinónimo de creatividad. Por un lado, es un proceso cognitivo sofisticado que involucra otros elementos además de la creatividad: acción dirigida a objetivos, funciones ejecutivas, monitoreo sensorial y feedback, y variables contextuales como la interacción social (Faber y McIntosh, 2020). Y por el otro, la creatividad implica una capacidad de creación de productos novedosos de diversas modalidades, no únicamente musicales o auditivas (Torrance, 1965).…”

“…Improvisar una pieza musical es una tarea cognitiva compleja que emplea numerosas redes cerebrales para diseñar, producir y monitorear estímulos musicales novedosos, a diferencia de lo que sucede cuando se toca una pieza conocida, no novedosa (Faber y McIntosh, 2020). Por esta razón, representa un excelente paradigma experimental para el estudio de la creatividad humana (Biasutti, 2015;McPherson y Limb, 2013).…”

Spatiospectral brain networks reflective of improvisational experience

“…Following from definitions of creativity in the psychology literature, improvisation can be characterized as the spontaneous formation of novel, high quality output, that is novel and useful (Sternberg et al, 2004). Recent work has begun to coalesce knowledge and models from electroencephalography (EEG) studies (Stevens Jr & Zabelina, 2019), the involvement of the motor system (Bashwiner & Bacon, 2019), the importance of expertise (Pinho et al, 2014;Braun, 2008), perception-action coupling (Loui, 2018), top-down and bottom-up networks (Faber & McIntosh, 2020), and network neuroscience (Beaty et al, 2019;Belden et al, 2020).…”