Spontaneous Melodic Productions of Expert Musicians Contain Sequencing Biases Seen in Language Production

Abstract

Language production involves complex action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing considerable constraints on working memory that lead to sequencing biases in production. Researchers have speculated that these biases may extend beyond language to other human behaviors involving action sequencing, but this claim has not been empirically investigated. Here we provide a strong test of this hypothesis, examining whether biases seen in language production also constrain one of the most complex and spontaneous human behaviors: musical improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvised solo transcriptions from eminent jazz musicians, we test for the existence of an established production bias observed in language production termed easy first—a tendency for more accessible sequences to occur at the beginning of a phrase, allowing incremental planning of more complex phrases. Our analysis shows consistent evidence of easy first in improvised music. We find that the beginning of improvised musical phrases contains 1) more frequently occurring interval patterns, 2) smaller intervals, 3) less interval variety, 4) less pitch variety, and 5) fewer direction changes. There was no easy first bias in a control corpus containing simulated data with the same structure, indicating that the effects are specific to real-time melodic production and not simply due to stylistic conventions. The findings indicate that even expert jazz musicians, known for spontaneous creative performance, reliably retrieve easily-accessed melodic sequences before creating more complex sequences—consistent with an incremental planning strategy employed in language production—suggesting that similar biases constrain the spontaneous production of music and language.

Frequently Occurring Melodic Patterns are Easier to Recall

“…The reverse also would then hold true: more unexpected musical events will have a higher information content and if conceptualized as a proxy for memory, would be harder to retain in working memory and then recall. Work in improvisation has provided some evidence that "easier" patterns have some privileged position in empirical data investigating jazz solos and provide peripheral support linking the musical patterns to measures of processing fluency (Beaty et al, 2020).…”

Interval patterns are dependent on metrical position in jazz solos

“…Further, a recent study by Beaty et al (2020) found that jazz improvisation exhibits an easyfirst sequencing bias, in which more accessible musical sequences are placed at the beginning of a phrase. One of their criteria for defining a sequence as easy (i.e., accessible) was that it is part of a pattern of intervals that occurs frequently.…”