Musical Improvisational Interactions in the Digital Era

This paper considers the issue of musical improvisational interactions in the digital era by pursuing the following three steps. 1) I will raise the question of the meaning and value of liveness, and in particular of live musical improvisation, in the age of the internet and discuss some effects of the so-called digital revolution on improvisation practices. 2) Then I will suggest that the interactions made possible by the web can be understood as kinds of live improvisational practices and I will briefly outline how such practices also involve musical improvisation. 3) Finally, I will focus on some aesthetic and philosophical aspects of new kinds of live improvisation made possible by recent progress in artificial intelligence research.

Choose your own adventure: Vocal jazz improvisation, conceptual metaphor, and cognitive embodiment

Creativity in the form of musical improvisation has received growing attention from researchers informed by the literature on embodiment. To date, this research has focused on the embodied experiences of improvising instrumentalists rather than those of improvising singers. This article investigates the experience of embodiment during improvisation through a systematic analysis of the metaphorical language used by an artist-level jazz singer in her reflections on practice. Extensive interview data with the participant were analyzed to identify and reconstruct metaphorical expressions into conceptual metaphors. In this process, the metaphor of IMPROVISATION IS AN ADVENTURE was identified as the overarching conceptual structure that the participant used to make sense of her experiences of improvisation. This metaphor and its mappings illuminate the cognitively embodied dimension of vocal jazz improvisation. These findings will be of interest to jazz singers and vocal jazz educators who are encouraged to explore more fully the role of the body–mind’s interactions with its environment in order to establish expertise in improvisational ways of knowing. This research illuminates the multidimensional nature of an expert singer’s experiences of improvisation and is presented as a provocation for future research to include singers as participants when investigating musical improvisation and cognitive embodiment.

Exercises Using Musical Instruments

This section requires the use of musical instruments for all the exercises, some for soloists and others for ensembles of various sizes. All of these exercises are improvisations, yet the focus is not on the idea of improvisation itself, but on specific dramatic or emotional goals. Improvisation in this chapter may signify dramatic rather than musical improvisation. Several of the exercises address the art of interpretating existing music and require spontaneity and imagination but do not ask for the participant to improvise music. Acting techniques, such as those developed by the Group Theater, are here repurposed for musicians in order to address aspects of memory, emotion, and imagination and to inspire new ways of thinking about performing, such as playing with the actor’s concept of subtext or gibberish from a musician’s perspective. New exercises included here are inspired by sampling and robots, plus a new series of exercises in this edition includes the improv comedy techniques of Nichols and May as a template for musical spontaneity.

Mind wandering and musical creativity in jazz improvisation

Mind wandering is a prevalent and ubiquitous phenomenon. Several studies suggest that mind wandering benefits creativity if it occurs in the incubation period of a creative problem-solving task. However, it could be impairing real-time expression of creative behavior if it occurs during the course of a creative task. This dissociation between incubation and performance suggests that mind wandering poses a double-edged sword to creative cognition. Jazz improvisation provides an ecologically useful framework for studying the effects of mind wandering on creativity. Here we hypothesized that mind wandering during a musical improvisation task would be associated with higher levels of musical creativity, compared with on-task attention. Nine experienced musicians performed several jazz improvisation tasks interleaved with the presentation of random thought probes. The results showed that musical improvisation during unintentional mind wandering was associated with higher musical creativity when compared with improvisation during on-task attention. However, mind wandering did not impact overall improvisational quality. Altogether, these data suggest that the positive relationship between mind wandering and creativity also extends to artistic performance domains.

Musical strategies to improve children’s memory in an educational context

Music-based interventions and music lessons modulate cognitive functions, such as language or attention. However, the specific and differential effects of musical activities are a new focus of research. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of musical improvisation, a focal musical intervention, on the emotional memory of 4- and 5-year-old children. Each child individually looked at 24 neutral and emotional pictures and rated their valence and arousal. After that, the children were exposed to one of three interventions: musical improvisation (experimental intervention), musical reproduction (active control intervention), or rest (passive control intervention). Then, recall and recognition (immediate and deferred) were used to evaluate memory performance. The main results indicated that musical improvisation, compared with a reproduction music activity, improved memory. In addition, rest improved recognition compared with reproduction. Besides, children recalled more emotional than neutral images. Musical improvisation is a promising technique to be implemented in the educational field.