The spur of the moment: what jazz improvisation tells cognitive science

Abstract

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus's account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus's notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of "sense-making". At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser's expertise (and of day-to-day living), we propose, lies a form of "higher-level inner sense-making" that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus's idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful (i.e. present in the moment) improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

“…Before we begin, it should be noted that several authors who work in embodied and enactive cognitive science, as well as ecological dynamics and distributed cognition, have written on creative processes (see e.g., Hristovski et al, 2011 ; Vallee-Tourangeau and Vallee-Tourangeau, 2014 ; Vallee-Tourangeau et al, 2016 ; Kimmel et al, 2018 ; Torrance and Schumann, 2019 ). However, as Malinin (2019) argues “there is [still] minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills.” This paper, therefore, builds on this scholarship to provide additional grounding to such lines of research, stimulating a dialogue between different perspectives on creativity in music and beyond.…”

Choosing a Markov blanket

“…Vickhoff considers music as an instance of culture, because it is governed by a system of shared expectations, and conforms to a "style"a type of convention with esthetic value. To this, we would add a third salient characteristic of music, the arts and, indeed, of culture more generally: improvisation and creative invention (Torrance & Schumann 2019). All of these aspects are related to TTOM.…”

Technoperformances: using metaphors from the performance arts for a postphenomenology and posthermeneutics of technology use

“…In the phase of instruction and learning of skill to use a music instrument or a technology that is new to me, I need to think about what I am doing (see again Dreyfus), and like in music improvisation at all times higher level sense-making may come in, as we can learn from cognitive science. It has been argued that instead of becoming mindless, the music improvisor gains new worlds in and on which to improvise (Torrance and Schumann 2018). Technology, understood as use and technoperformance, also opens up new worlds for action, knowledge, and improvisation.…”