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

Abstract

Agents engaged in creative joint actions might need to find a balance between the demands of doing something collectively, by adopting congruent and interacting behaviors, and the goal of delivering a creative output, which can eventually benefit from disagreements and autonomous behaviors. Here, we investigate this idea in the context of collective free improvisation -a paradigmatic example of group creativity in which musicians aim at creating music that is as complex and unprecedented as possible without relying on predefined plans or individual roles.Controlling for both the familiarity between the musicians and their physical co-presence, duos of improvisers were asked to freely improvise together and to individually annotate their performances with a digital interface, indicating at each time whether they were playing "with", "against", or "without" their partner. At an individual level, we found that musicians largely intended to converge with their co-improviser, making only occasional use of non-cooperative or non-interactive modes such as "playing against" or "playing without". By contrast, at the group level, musicians tended to combine their relational intents in such a way as to create interactional dissensus. We also demonstrate that co-presence and familiarity act as interactional smoothers: they increase the agents' overall level of relational plasticity and allow for the exploration of less cooperative behaviors. Overall, our findings suggest that relational intents might function as a primary resource for creative joint actions.

Beyond togetherness: Interactional dissensus fosters creativity and tension in freely improvised musical duos.

“…Now, if expert listeners found snippets with higher interactional dissensus to be more creative, why improvisers do not stay constantly in such a state when performing? Why, as Golvet et al (2021) showed, such passages are in fact the minority, with the majority of the performance seeing the musicians displaying more consensual behaviors? A first possibility could be that constant dissensus impairs musicians' empathetic attunement toward one another (Seddon & Biasutti, 2009), leading ultimately to the worst performance, or even to the potential dissolution of the group.…”

“…This does not mean that there are no coordination criteria in CFI, but simply that such criteria are mostly contextual, depending on the specific sonic configurations emerging from the musicians’ interactions. In any case, such flexible coordination criteria certainly allow musicians to explore more diverse modes of relations—including dissensual relations (Aucouturier & Canonne, 2017; Golvet et al, 2021)—without putting at risk the unfolding of the collective performance nor its adherence to a predefined aesthetic or stylistic framework. Second, music-making is a highly multidimensional affair: when musicians play “against” one another, it does not necessarily mean that they oppose every musical dimension.…”

“…Golvet et al (2021) had their participants improvise in two different conditions: either in the same room (“copresent” condition) or in two separated studio booths (“isolated” condition), hearing each other through headphones but not being able to see each other. For this first experiment, we only used tracks that were recorded in the copresent condition, that is, 19 tracks.…”

“…As shown in Figure 1, the triangular interface used by the musicians to annotate their performances included white dashed lines, that delineated various areas within the interface. In order to test for the effects of dissensus in a direct and efficient way, we treated Golvet et al (2021)’s annotation data in a binomial way, separating between times in which a musician was intending to play “with” her partner (and was thus in the “with” area of the triangle interface) and times in which she was not (and was thus anywhere else in the triangle interface, i.e., in the “against” area, in the “without” area, or in the “center” area). Dissensus was thus conceived in a rather broad way, as encompassing all the behaviors that were not clearly aiming at converging with one’s improvisation partner.…”

“…For example, the two musicians might be both distant from the "with" vertex (thus exhibiting a high degree of first-order dissensus), but close to one another near the "against" vertex, "agreeing to disagree" so to speak (and thus exhibiting a low degree of second-order dissensus). Golvet et al (2021) showed that noncooperating (playing "against") or noninteracting (playing "without") behaviors were no stranger to CFI, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the total playing time. This is in line with observations often found in the literature on CFI, such as Corbett (2016): "improvisation is social music.…”