Researching musical improvisation: Questions and challenges.

Abstract

This article considers the art of jazz improvisation from the perspective of how it is defined and the challenges it poses to researchers exploring its cognitive basis. Questions on the nature of improvisation, the difference between student and professional improvisers, and the effect of context on improvisation were posed to expert jazz musicians and educators. An interdisciplinary approach to exploring the improvising brain scientifically and aesthetically will benefit these lines of inquiry.Keywords: musical improvisation, music education, testing aestheticsExploring the art of musical improvisation through psycholog- ical research raises interesting and difficult challenges. By neces- sity scientists deconstruct an aesthetic and creative experience to describe the underlying cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that give rise to it. Taking a reductive approach to art can feel intui- tively misguided, as it involves analyzing a certain kind of intu- ition and the beauty that can emerge when the rules of formal structure are broken. Nevertheless, researchers document, analyze, and propose models of improvisation; their work contributes to studies of creativity, divergent thinking, performance skill, aes- thetics, and musical communication.Compared with most other musical performance tasks, jazz improvisation has received relatively little attention from psychol- ogists (Gabrielsson, 2003), but the following methodology is com- monly used. A musician improvises with or without accompani- ment. Video, audio, and/or neural imaging tools capture the performance, and the solo is often notated after the fact (Bengtsson, Csikszentmihalyi, & Ullen, 2007; Berkowitz & An- sari, 2008; Brophy, 2005; Limb & Braun, 2008; Mendonca & Wallace, 2004; Norgaard, 2011). The musician is frequently asked to comment on the improvisation to answer the question, What were you thinking? Experts may rate the solo's quality to help find correlations between improvisational skill and other cognitive abilities, or to examine stages of improvisation.Results of these studies and the articles presented here tell us that the jazz improviser starts with some degree of short- or long-range plan for a solo, engages self-monitoring and self- evaluation during it, and can alter the plan midsolo as new infor- mation and ideas arrive. Postimprovisation he may perform a rapid analysis of how the solo he intended to play compared with the one he executed. These cognitive processes might be consciously driven only part of the time, as Bruno Nettl (1998) reminds us, In improvisation, one must face the likelihood that some of the material may be precisely intended while other passages are thrown in without specific thought, possibly to permit the per- former to think of 'what to do next' (p. 13).On the receiving end of the solo is the listener, who often cannot tell whether pure improvisation has actually taken place (as op- posed to a solo drawn entirely from the improviser's long-term memory). Oblivious to the soloist's aesthetic intention, listeners' experiences of jazz improvisation, multiplied many times over the course of a musician's career, accumulate to forge his reputation and earning potential. For the professional jazz performer, impro- visational skill is the coin of the realm. The great jazz soloist becomes legendary while the less adept remains obscure. Jazz aficionados, many of whom are untrained in music theory, will nevertheless have opinions on what constitutes an effective solo; researchers will work to discover how these aesthetic criteria develop, and what they are based on (Brattico, Bogert, & Jacobsen, 2013; Nieminen, Istok, Brattico, Tervaniemi, & Huotilainen, 2011; Repp, 1997; see also Wollner, 2013).Authors featured in the present special issue explored questions of improvisation from many angles. Perhaps all would agree that what we know is incomplete; we can still debate much of what is known. …