The dynamics of the improvising brain: a study of musical creativity using jazz improvisation

Abstract

One of the defining elements of jazz is the ability to improvise. The neuroscience of jazz improvisation has shown promising results for understanding domain-specific and domaingeneral processes of creativity. However, until date no previous studies have examined how different modes of improvisation (musical creativity) evolve over time and which cognitive mechanisms are responsible for different stages of musical creation. Here, we used fMRI to measure for the first time the dynamic neural substrates of musical creativity in 16 skilled jazz pianists while they improvised freely (iFreely), and by melody (iMelody), and contrasted with resting-state. We used the leading eigenvector dynamics analysis (LEiDA) to explore the whole-brain dynamics underlying spontaneous musical creation. Our results reveal a substate comprising areas of the dorsal default mode (DMN), the left executive control (ECN), the anterior salience, language and precuneus networks with significantly higher probability of occurrence in iFreely than in iMelody. In addition, iFreely is also linked to an increased prevalence and dynamic attachment to this substate and to a "global" substate. Such indicates that a more free mode of improvisation (iFreely) requires an increased dynamic convergence to networks comprising brain areas involved in processes linked to creativity (generation, evaluation, prediction, and syntactic processing). iMelody, a more constrained mode of improvisation involves a higher recurrence of brain regions involved in auditory and reward processes. This study brings new insights into the large-scale brain mechanisms supporting and promoting the complex process of creativity, specifically in the context of music improvisation in jazz.

Sweet anticipation: Predictability of familiar music in autism

“…We applied a novel method to capture patterns of functional connectivity from fMRI data at single TR resolution with reduced dimensionality, the Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (LEiDA) (Alves Da Mota et al, 2020;Cabral et al, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2019;Lord et al, 2019;E.A. Stark et al, 2020).…”

“…If instead the first eigenvector V 1 (t) has elements of different signs (i.e., positive and negative), the BOLD signals project into different directions with respect to the leading eigenvector, which naturally divides the brain into distinct modes (colored in red and blue in Figure 1B middle panels). Previous studies using LEiDA have shown that the subset of brain areas whose BOLD signals appear temporally phase-shifted from the main BOLD signal orientation reveal meaningful functional brain networks (Alves Da Mota et al, 2020;Cabral et al, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2019;Lord et al, 2019;E.A. Stark et al, 2020).…”

“…Statistical differences between groups, in probabilities of occurrence and switching profiles were assessed using a permutationbased unpaired t-test. The significant thresholds were corrected to account for multiple comparisons as 0.05/k, where k is the number of substates (or independent hypotheses) tested in each partition model (Alves Da Mota et al, 2020;Cabral et al, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2019;Lord et al, 2019;E.A. Stark et al, 2020).…”

“…We employed a data-driven approach to study the brain dynamics associated with music listening in the two conditions, between groups, focusing upon the dominant functional connectivity (FC) pattern captured by the leading eigenvector of dynamic FC matrices. This method has been successful in discovering key dynamic network differences both at rest (Cabral et al, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2019;Lord et al, 2019) and in taskbased data (Alves Da Mota et al, 2020;E.A. Stark et al, 2020).…”

Types, Styles, and Spaces of Possibility : Phenomenology and Musical Improvisation

“…There are many answers to this question: historical (Hersch, 2008;Hughes and Brown, 1982), pedagogical (Kratus, 1995), sociocultural (Anderson, 2007), and neurobiological (Mota et al, 2020). Phenomenologically, we can describe improvisation in the jazz context as the exploration of a possibility space.…”