Ebook: The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment

The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. An improviser must master a musical language to such a degree as to be able spontaneously to invent stylistically idiomatic compositions in the moment. This feat is one of the pinnacles of human creativity, and yet its cognitive basis is poorly understood. What musical knowledge is required for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? This book explores these questions through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the study of pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with improvisers, musical analysis of improvised performances, and cognitive neuroscience. Findings from the treatises, interviews, and analyses are discussed from the perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning, memory, and expertise, as well as data from functional brain imaging studies of improvisation. Pedagogy, learning, and performance in improvisation are explored in a cross-cultural context, demonstrating universal features across a wide variety of musical traditions. Though disparate, these sources provide a convergent picture of the improvising mind, suggesting that musical improvisation draws on some of the very same cognitive processes and neural resources as the more mundane but equally infinitely creative faculties of language and movement. Improvisation therefore provides a new focus for comparisons of music and language cognition: while past research comparing music and language cognition has focused almost exclusively on perception of the two sound systems, the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and production of music and language have not been systematically explored. Here, learning to improvise is compared with language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological perspectives.