Listening to Improvisation

Abstract

Is there something peculiar in our appreciation of improvised music? How does knowing that the music we are listening to is improvised affect our experience? As a first step in answering these questions, I have conducted an experiment in which an audio recording of the very same piece of music – a saxophone/clarinet freely improvised duet – was presented to 16 listeners, either as an improvisation ("IMPRO" condition), or as the live performance of a composition for saxophone and clarinet ("COMPO" condition). Listeners were encouraged both to reflect on their listening experience and to describe in their own words the music they heard. First, evaluative judgments were strongly different in the two listening conditions: listeners approached the piece with specific sets of values in mind, by relying on different features or different kinds of criteria (aesthetic ones in the COMPO condition vs ethical ones in the IMPRO condition) to ground their appreciative judgments. Second, and maybe more importantly, listening experiences were quite different in the two conditions: in the COMPO condition, the piece was more commonly experienced as a sonic product, with listeners paying great attention to the various acoustical effects achieved by the musicians and to the overall structure (or lack thereof); in the IMPRO condition, the music was often described as a kind of communicational or relational process, with descriptions that largely interweaved music-specific terms and more broadly social terms. Overall, this experiment shows that our listening experience can be dramatically affected by modal considerations, i.e., by how we think the music was produced. More specifically, it sheds some light on what constitutes the core of the aesthetic experience of improvisation by exhibiting what is centrally at play (and what is not) when we listen to collectively improvised music.

With, against, or without? Familiarity and copresence increase interactional dissensus and relational plasticity in freely improvising duos.

“…As such, individual roles and creative contributions to the overall output are constantly shifting and renegotiated over the course of the performance, and the creativity of the performance crucially depends on the way improvisers dynamically relate to one another. Interpersonal relations are thus at the very core of the practice of CFI (Clarke, 2005), the musicians’ dialogical engagements with one another acting as one of the primary locus of CFI’s aesthetic distinctiveness (Canonne, 2018a).…”

Perception of Structure in Collective Free Improvisation and its Context Dependency: An Exploratory Analysis

“…We will not address this debate here. However, Canonne (2018) demonstrated how these conceptions of structure are much more implied when a piece is described as a composition than when it is addressed as an improvisation, even when dealing with new music. It is shown that listeners tend to search for cues -structurally -when listening to a composition, given that a previous work by the composer is assumed.…”

“…As such, we aim to investigate the following research question: are there differences in the perception of a possible structure when the given context is different? This question is raised due to recent experiments, such as the aforementioned study by Canonne and Garnier (2015), where the sequential form was put to test, and also from Canonne's (2018) experiment on the qualitative differences in listening to a musical piece defined as an improvisation or as a composition. Results from the latter show that participants tended to have a negative evaluation-in example, in terms of musical coherence and the overall structure of the piece-of pieces that were in reality free improvisations but were contextualized as compositions.…”

Analytical Approaches to Electroacoustic Music Improvisation

“…Others may be surprised to find out after the concert that it was improvised. Some studies have even shown that there is no real difference between listening to a free improvised performance and a contemporary instrumental creation (Canonne 2019). There is no reason why this should not be the same in the case of electroacoustic improvisation.…”