Listeners' and Performers' Shared Understanding of Jazz Improvisations

Schober, Michael F.; Spiro, Neta

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01629

Cited by 10 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…In some cases (general comments about the performers) there is only agreement between the performers and a listener, and no agreement with each other. Overall, the pattern is not consistent with a hypothesis that performers' understanding of each other is privileged relative to a non-performing listener, consistent with our prior evidence from improvisations on a jazz standard (Schober and Spiro, 2014 , 2016 ).…”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 80%

“…Our findings provide further evidence on a listeners-as-outsiders hypothesis (Schober and Spiro, 2016 ) that listeners' different perspective on a performance (potentially leaving them out of some thoughts and feelings that the performers might share) may lead them to agree with other listeners' judgments more than with the performers'. (This hypothesis is independent of a more-expert-listeners-understand-more-like-performers hypothesis).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…How far this pattern extends is an open question. Additional studies using these or other materials with broader ranges of performers, performances, and listeners from different communities, along the lines of Schober and Spiro's ( 2016 ) audience study, will be an important next step.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

2017

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When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.

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Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 80%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

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What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

2017

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“…However, we acknowledge that the operational definition and coding method used here is just one possible approach that could be expanded upon in future to include self-reports and interviews with the musicians themselves (cf. [ 90 ]), explorations of the intentional nature of interactions, comparisons of successful/unsuccessful attempts at interaction, directional interactions (e.g. leadership roles), etc.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared periodic performer movements coordinate interactions in duo improvisations

et al. 2018

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Human interaction involves the exchange of temporally coordinated, multimodal cues. Our work focused on interaction in the visual domain, using music performance as a case for analysis due to its temporally diverse and hierarchical structures. We made use of two improvising duo datasets—(i) performances of a jazz standard with a regular pulse and (ii) non-pulsed, free improvizations—to investigate whether human judgements of moments of interaction between co-performers are influenced by body movement coordination at multiple timescales. Bouts of interaction in the performances were manually annotated by experts and the performers’ movements were quantified using computer vision techniques. The annotated interaction bouts were then predicted using several quantitative movement and audio features. Over 80% of the interaction bouts were successfully predicted by a broadband measure of the energy of the cross-wavelet transform of the co-performers’ movements in non-pulsed duos. A more complex model, with multiple predictors that captured more specific, interacting features of the movements, was needed to explain a significant amount of variance in the pulsed duos. The methods developed here have key implications for future work on measuring visual coordination in musical ensemble performances, and can be easily adapted to other musical contexts, ensemble types and traditions.

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“…As modeled in laboratory referential communication tasks (maze games, figure‐matching tasks), interlocutors can succeed at the tasks (accurately finding their way, selecting the right ambiguous figures) without having to perfectly agree on the detailed conceptualizations underlying every term they use; local “conceptual pacts” that speakers in dialog establish (Brennan & Clark, ) are not exhaustive, nor are they permanent or even necessarily generalizable to other conversational partners. Undetected conceptual misalignment may extend beyond spoken dialog to other forms of interdependent action; for example, jazz improvisers can play together without conceiving of all their individual contributions or their joint product in the same way as each other (Pras, Schober, & Spiro, ; Schober & Spiro, , ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Misunderstandings Matter? Evidence From Survey Interviews About Smoking

Schober

Suessbrick

Conrad

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

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This paper examines when conceptual misalignments in dialog lead to consequential miscommunication. Two studies explore misunderstanding in survey interviews of the sort conducted by governments and social scientists, where mismeasurement can have real social costs. In 131 interviews about tobacco use, misalignment between respondents' and researchers' conceptions of ordinary expressions like "smoking" and "every day" was quantified by probing respondents' interpretations of survey terms and re-administering the survey questionnaire with standard definitions after the interview. Respondents' interpretations were surprisingly variable, and in many cases they did not match the conceptions that researchers intended them to use. More often than one might expect, this conceptual variability was consequential, leading to answers (and, in principle, to estimates of the prevalence of smoking and related attributes in the population) that would have been different had conceptualizations been aligned; for example, fully 12% of respondents gave a different answer about having smoked 100 cigarettes in their entire life when later given a standard definition. In other cases misaligned interpretations did not lead to miscommunication, in that the differences would not have led to different survey responses. Although clarification of survey terms during the interview sometimes improved conceptual alignment, this was not guaranteed; in this corpus some needed attempts at clarification were never made, some attempts did not succeed, and some seemed to make understanding worse. The findings suggest that conceptual misalignments may be more frequent in ordinary conversation than interlocutors know, and that attempts to detect and clarify them may not always work. They also suggest that at least some unresolved misunderstandings do not matter in the sense that they do not change the outcome of the communication-in this case, the survey estimates.

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Listeners' and Performers' Shared Understanding of Jazz Improvisations

Cited by 10 publications

References 65 publications

What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

What About Their Performance Do Free Jazz Improvisers Agree Upon? A Case Study

Shared periodic performer movements coordinate interactions in duo improvisations

When Do Misunderstandings Matter? Evidence From Survey Interviews About Smoking

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