Individual Decisions and Perceived Form in Collective Free Improvisation

International audience; This paper proposes a first attempt to study quantitatively Collective Free Improvisation (CFI). We report an experiment designed to study the relationship between the improvisers’ individual high-level decisions and the improvisation’s form perceived by external auditors. We recorded 16 trios in which the improvisers used a MIDI-pedal to indicate in real-time a significant change in their own musical production. Expert listeners were later asked to segment each improvisation so that we obtained their perception of the structure. By analysing the correlations between musicians’ individual decisions and listeners’ segmentation points, we discuss how the improvisation’…

Play together, think alike: Shared mental models in expert music improvisers

International audience; When musicians improvise together, they tend to agree beforehand on a common structure (e.g. a jazz standard) which helps them coordinate. However, in the particular case of collective free improvisation (CFI), musicians deliberately avoid having such a referent. How, then, can they coordinate? We propose that CFI musicians who have experience playing together come to share higher-level knowledge, which is not piece-specific but rather task-specific: an implicit mental model of what it is to improvise freely. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 19 expert improvisers from the Parisian CFI community, who had various degrees of experience playing with one another. D…

Le problème de la coordination dans l'improvisation collective libre. Premiers résultats expérimentaux

Improvisation et processus compositionnel dans la genèse de Fenêtre Ovale de Karl Naëgelen

Improvisation and Compositional Process in Karl Naëgelen’s Fenêtre Ovale
 This paper is centred around the analysis of the creative process underlying the genesis of a recent work of music by French composer Karl Naëgelen, Fenêtre Ovale (2011), written in collaboration with two free improvisers active on the Parisian scene, Ève Risser (piano) and Joris Rühl (clarinet). This piece is remarkable in that, contrary to the vast majority of works composed in a so-called “comprovisation” framework, where the interaction between the composed and the improvised elements essentially takes place during the moments of performance, its score never actually requires any act of improvisation from its…

Focal Points in Collective Free Improvisation

OLLECTIVE FREE IMPROVISATION (herein abbreviated as CFI), while not a recent phenomenon in music (free jazz’s first experiments date from the late 1950s), remains under-studied. The extant literature either deals with political aspects (Carles and Comolli 2000) or tries to analyze the resulting music, using musicological tools (Jost 1994) or new concepts drawn from the complexity sciences (Borgo 2005). My research on CFI focuses on a cognitive approach, in order to understand the process of collective improvisation: 1 how a group of improvisers who do not know each other and are not using a common referent 2 (Pressing 1988) can answer the challenge of making music together. This paper deals…

Improvisation : usages et transferts d'une catégorie

International audience

Even violins can cry: specifically vocal emotional behaviours also drive the perception of emotions in non-vocal music.

A wealth of theoretical and empirical arguments have suggested that music triggers emotional responses by resembling the inflections of expressive vocalizations, but have done so using low-level acoustic parameters (pitch, loudness, speed) that, in fact, may not be processed by the listener in reference to human voice. Here, we take the opportunity of the recent availability of computational models that allow the simulation of three specifically vocal emotional behaviours: smiling, vocal tremor and vocal roughness. When applied to musical material, we find that these three acoustic manipulations trigger emotional perceptions that are remarkably similar to those observed on speech and scream…