What it is like to improvise together? Investigating the phenomenology of joint action through improvised musical performance

Abstract

Joint actions typically involve a sense of togetherness that has a distinctive phenomenological component. While it has been hypothesized that group size, hierarchical structure, division of labour, and expertise impact agents' phenomenology during joint actions, the studies conducted so far have mostly involved dyads performing simple actions. We explore in this study the complex case of collectively improvised musical performances, focusing particularly on the way group size and interactional patterns modulate the phenomenology of joint action. We recorded two expert improvisation ensembles of contrasting sizes (16 vs 4 musicians) and collected data about their musical behaviour, as well as reports about five aspects of their phenomenology (sense of agency, agentive identity, integration, dependence, reflexivity) and about their musical intentions. Our overall data enabled us to assess how those five phenomenological dimensions related to one another during jointly improvised performances. They also show how such phenomenology varied with the way improvisers dynamically related to one another throughout the performance. Finally, we observe that group size strongly altered the phenomenology of improvisers who otherwise shared many characteristics (high expertise, similar aesthetic preferences, etc.). Our study thus sheds light on the interactional and structural parameters that shape and modulate our felt experience when acting together, and thereby highlights the importance of pluralism for studying the phenomenology of joint action.

Brain-to-brain communication during musical improvisation: a performance case study

“…Moreover, the observed brain synchrony dynamics are associated to the spontaneous decisions and interactions of the musicians during an unconstrained free jazz improvisation, which does not facilitate the temporal prediction that a steady pulse would cause in the musicians. 29 Our results suggest that bispectrum was able to detect relevant temporal and spatial information about musician's interactions during the performance. Therefore, the proposed method could be used to track the degree of synchronized interactions and can be applied to different contexts.…”

“…First, this study has a small sample size (three professional musicians). However, this drawback can be justified by the ecological validity of our experiments, which were intended to capture the interactions of musicians during real-world improvised performance, 28,29 and the experimental design that included counterbalancing to allow for testing different participants in different orders. The authors believe the ecological approach and experimental methodology used herein represent a milestone in the acquisition and understanding of brain data "in action and in context", and the development of brain-to-brain communication metrics.…”

“…Considering the rich and complex interchange of cognitive processes necessary during collaborative artistic performances, its study using the hyperscanning approach is a valid approach to explore the shared neural cognitive traces that emerge from these interactions. 28,29 Collaborative, free musical production (improvisation) is a complex and rich form of social interaction, 30 it has also been described as a continuous process of generation and transformation of musical interaction, 31 and offers an interesting object of study for hyperscanning. Similarities between music and language have been observed previously in terms of the social interaction they entail; as described in, 32 a jazz improvisation can be interpreted as a conversation, and a good improvisation as a complex, meaningful conversation.…”

Focus of attention affects togetherness experiences and body interactivity in piano duos.

“…Some recent studies have investigated the conditions that encourage positive social experiences during ensemble playing. These conditions include a balance in the magnitude of contributions from different ensemble members and a consensus on what the rules of the performance will be (Seddon & Biasutti, 2009; Saint-Germier et al, 2021). The positive social experiences that emerge during real-time musical interaction could be described in terms of togetherness .…”

“…Joint agency is more likely to arise in egalitarian groups than in hierarchical groups where the contributions of some individuals dominate, and it is positively linked with partner predictability (Bolt & Loehr, 2017), mutual rather than one-way coordination (Bolt et al, 2016), and coordination success (Bolt et al, 2016; Dell’Anna, Buhmann, et al, 2020). In collective free improvisation, joint agency has been negatively linked with interdependence in sonic activities between coperformers, suggesting that high degrees of interdependence might reduce the musicians’ sense that they are contributing to the joint outcome (Saint-Germier et al, 2021). The construct of joint agency may be subdivided into shared agency, the sense that agency is distributed among group members, and united agency, the sense that group members are acting as a single unit (Pacherie, 2012).…”