Playing with time to escape time and space: Slow Music Improvisation in an online space for Mindfulness

This article is an exegetical look at a series of improvisational concert/performance/co-creations that started in the lockdown of March 2020 in New Zealand. This informal series of livestream concerts has continued to develop since that time, with a range of collaborative performers. This article serves to unpick some of the creative practice and conceptual framework that outline this series from the point of view of individual creative reflection and mindfulness. This series of events were designed to provide space for shared improvisation as a tool for mindfulness in uncertain times. It was also designed to provide some collective moments of reflection through a shared remote experience. But at the core, this series is in exploring ideas of slow improvisation. Working in a purely online context utilising the limitations of video and sound sharing technology to create specific new performative experiences. As a part of this process we as performers are places into a situation that works between individual awareness (as you are in a space by yourself) and collective experience (as you perform together online). This experience is very intuitive and the participants are forced to embrace the uncertainty of the environment and technology, and recognise the spontaneity of improvisational experiences that are mediated through the experience of shifting time, and the disembodied nature of Zoom to create music that has a sense of release and connection.

Transcendence

An interview with musician Shabaka Hutchings, leader of the bands Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. The conversation starts with a discussion of multiplicity and unity, and the imperial habit of reducing multiplicity down to a single dominant unity, whether through imposing one religion, one view of empire, or one recognised form of art music. It looks at the different ways of viewing culture in the West and in African countries. And it discusses the relationship between jazz and classical music; improvisation; musical dialogue; South African music; transcendence through music; and musical healing.

The Value of Learning Collective Free Music Improvisation: Preservice Music Educators’ Perspectives

I conducted a case study to explore preservice music teachers’ behaviors, thoughts, and feelings when engaged in collective free music improvisation. Nine preservice music teachers were taught how to freely improvise within groups as part of a teacher education course and participated in interviews and focus group discussions. Major themes highlighted learning across three segments that emphasized communication and collaborative skills, entrepreneurial skills and risk taking, and reconciliation and transformation. I concluded that the sociomusical outcomes produced by collective free improvisation may complement those of more formal and idiomatic improvisation practices, and that by introducing preservice music teachers to free improvisation activities, they may be more willing to engage PK–12 students in free improvisation lessons that enhance the existing school music curriculum.

The Role of Instructional Scaffolding to Facilitate Problem Solving Skills in Music Improvisation

This study aims to investigate the role of instructional scaffolding in developing problem-solving skills in melodic improvisation among beginner piano students. Three action research cycles were implemented to identify the effectiveness of scaffolding instructions. The process of measuring students’ problem-solving skills in improvisation is audio-recorded and further transcribed onto music scores in the third action research cycle for data analysis. The findings showed a positive development and improvement in the students’ problem-solving skills and filled the knowledge void for music teachers to plan and teach music improvisation progressively. These findings were helpful for music teachers to implement future musical tasks in creative activities.

Co-Sounding: Fostering intersubjectivity in electronic music improvisation

Shared music improvisation constitutes a formidable vector for intersubjective connection. Improvisation is a space of non-semantic communication that allows for putting oneself at risk and requires mutual trust and listening, as well as dialogical qualities. This article investigates the intersubjective dimension of improvisation in electronic music praxis, focusing on how the electronic medium can be used to foster mediation between musicians. The article builds on a practice-based enquiry in duo format, conducted in three successive technological settings, with a methodological entanglement of aesthetic and design aims. Systematic video documentation and participant observation provide an analytical counterpoint to an immersion in the improvisatory praxis. A set of design strategies for fostering intersubjective connection in shared musicianship emerges from the research. The findings provide the basis for a dialectical consideration between musical and intersubjective aesthetics. The discussion points to the diversity of social functions of music and their respective aesthetics. Electronic instruments’ inherent plasticity allows for reconfiguring the social space of music-making, and thus opens perspectives for devising synergetic music systems that emphasise an ethos of shared agency over the production of musical objects or performances.

TonalEmergence: An Agent-Based Model of Tonal Coordination

Humans have a remarkable capacity for coordination. Our ability to interact and act jointly in groups is crucial to our success as a species. Joint Action (JA) research has often concerned itself with simplistic behaviors in highly constrained laboratory tasks. But there has been a growing interest in understanding complex coordination in more open-ended contexts. In this regard, collective music improvisation has emerged as a fascinating model domain for studying basic JA mechanisms in an unconstrained and highly sophisticated setting. A number of empirical studies have begun to elucidate coordination mechanisms underlying joint musical improvisation, but these empirical findings have yet to be cached out in a working computational model. The present work fills this gap by presenting TonalEmergence, an idealized agent-based model of improvised musical coordination. TonalEmergence models the coordination of notes played by improvisers to generate harmony (i.e., tonality), by simulating agents that stochastically generate notes biased towards maximizing harmonic consonance given their partner's previous notes. The model replicates an interesting empirical result from a previous study of professional jazz pianists: that feedback loops of mutual adaptation between interacting agents support the production of consonant harmony. The model is further explored to show how complex tonal dynamics, such as the production and dissolution of stable tonal centers, are supported by agents that are characterized by 1) a tendency to strive toward consonance, 2) stochasticity, and 3) a limited memory for previously played notes. TonalEmergence thus provides a grounded computational model to simulate and probe the coordination mechanisms underpinning one of the more remarkable feats of human cognition: collective music improvisation.