[Dixielandjazz] Improvisation & Your Brain

[Stephen G Barbone]

Excerpted from a NY TIMES article.

When the Melody Takes a Detour, the Science Begins
NY TIMES - By PAM BELLUCK - June 6, 2011


In the middle of a World Science Festival panel on Saturday night, the  
guitarist Pat Metheny took a sudden U-turn from the program he had  
planned. Instead of performing one of his innovative compositions,  
plucked from any of the phases of his career as a style-shifting jazz  
omnivore, Mr. Metheny, performing with the bassist Larry Grenadier,  
decided on the spot to play a jazz standard.

And not just any jazz standard, but an especially ubiquitous one:  
"Autumn Leaves."

His point, during this panel called "Music and the Spark of  
Spontaneity," was to illustrate what some of the scientists sharing  
the stage had been talking about, that our brains have a kind of two- 
track approach to deciding what we like in the world.

On the one hand, we are wired to respond to things that are familiar,  
to predictability and patterns that help us make sense of what is  
around us. But at the same time, too much familiarity breeds, if not  
contempt, at least ennui or complacency. Our brains like newness too,  
things that surprise and deviate from an expected pattern.

"I love the idea of this question of novelty versus familiarity," Mr.  
Metheny said. "'Autumn Leaves,' everybody knows that." And, he added,  
"for the first few choruses, I'm going to use one finger on one  
string. I'm not going to do anything that's more complicated than  
anyone who could play simply would do."

Easy for him to say. Even the stripped-down version he started out  
with was exceptionally musical, bending the familiar melody around Mr.  
Grenadier's exuberantly rhythmic bass. But as their performance became  
more intricate and adventurous, it underscored the science: They   
could travel miles from the melody, they could do calisthenics with  
the chords, but the audience still understood it as "Autumn Leaves,"  
something they knew spiced with something entirely different.

Our preference for combining what we expect with what surprises us was  
demonstrated in recent studies on what makes music expressive by  
Daniel J. Levitin at McGill University, and also in brain imaging  
research by Edward Large at Florida Atlantic University. Both  
scientists used classical music: Chopin piano nocturnes or etudes in  
which the length and volume of notes were adjusted to varying degrees.  
They found that musicians and nonmusicians alike responded most to  
versions of the Chopin that included a lot of variety but not too  
much, and not variety that was just thrown into the mix in a random,  
out-of-context way.

The World Science Festival panel in the Great Hall at Cooper Union  
focused mostly on improvised music, especially the intuitive art of  
jazz, trying to address the question of what is actually happening  
when a musician spontaneously creates melodies, harmonies and rhythms  
that have never been played before.

After "Autumn Leaves," the moderator, John Schaefer, the host of the  
"Soundcheck" show on WNYC, gestured to the four scientists on the  
panel, and said to Mr. Metheny, "Before I ask these guys what was  
going on in your brain, let me ask you."

Mr. Metheny gave a thoughtful recitation of the elements in a jazz  
musician's toolkit. "The harmony, the basic flow of the rhythms, the  
way the chords are divided from key to key," he said, adding that  
"there's a whole set of options" from which an improviser can choose,  
including playing different musical scales or modes over a chord – “It  
could be Dorian, it could be Mixolydian."

But then he Cheshire Catted it, saying, "but the real answer is I  
wasn't thinking about any of them." Consider that "you just asked me a  
question in perfect English," he said to Mr. Schaefer. "Did you think,  
'O.K., I need a verb?'" or "about how to hold your tongue?"

Mr. Metheny's answer pointed up another duality in the way our brains  
work, that we have both conscious and unconscious brain processes,  
said one panelist, Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and the incoming  
president of Cooper Union, who is also a violinist. "The vast majority  
of stuff that goes on in our brain we do not have conscious access  
to," he said. "It's automatic."

But music requires "years and years of practice in order to make what  
is conscious unconscious," he said. Plus, improvisation is not just  
free-form playing – there has to be a mastery of structure and  
discipline. "If you want to fly off the edge of a cliff, you have to  
know where the cliff is," he said.

Improvising, in fact, may be one of the most complex abilities humans  
can develop because "it requires you to perfect all these different  
skills," said Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York  
University. Among other things, he said, improvising requires  
"terrific alignment between your ears and hands"; some learned or  
instinctive understanding of music theory; empathy, because  
improvising usually involves interacting with and responding to other  
musicians; and "fantastic motor control – you need to be both fast and  
accurate, and the brain's natural tendency is to be either fast or  
accurate."

Unraveling improvisation is, not surprisingly, a little like trying to  
capture a unicorn. And some people might wonder if there's a risk that  
scientific investigation could result in something resembling a scene  
in the Tom Stoppard play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," in  
which, as more and more people are able to see a unicorn, they  
perceive it as something pedestrian and uninspiring: "a horse with an  
arrow in its forehead."

At one point, Mr. Schaefer asked, "Is it worth the effort to try and  
demystify something that we enjoy and that we like to think of as kind  
of mysterious and magical?"

Charles Limb, a surgeon and specialist in the neurology of the ear at  
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who also plays saxophone, said, "I  
don't think in any way that music needs science," but "music is a tool  
by which we can understand the brain" and the science of music "really  
teaches us something fundamental about who we are, why we're here."

Dr. Limb has been putting jazz musicians into a functional magnetic  
resonance imaging machine, a process which requires them to lie on  
their backs, slide into the brain scanner, and keep their heads  
perfectly still, while their hands, stretched out in front of them  
outside the scanner, play on a jury-rigged piano keyboard. The  
musicians' brain activity is monitored as they played a written-down  
jazz melody they were asked to memorize and then as they improvised to  
the chord changes of that melody.

When the musicians improvised, Dr. Limb found, areas of the brain's  
prefrontal cortex linked to self-expression were activated, but an  
area linked to inhibition and self-monitoring "kind of shuts down when  
you go creative," he said. That did not happen when musicians played a  
memorized piece.

Dr. Limb is also putting hip-hop artists into the brain scanner.  
"They're totally into it," he said. "They say, 'You know I've wanted  
to know what's going on in my head for the past 20 years.'" He asks  
them to recite a memorized rap and then to improvise lyrics using  
certain cued words. Preliminary results suggest that rap improvisation  
activates different areas from music improvisation.

Aaron Berkowitz, who has researched the neural basis of improvisation  
and is also a pianist and fortepianist, used a different approach to  
compare the brains of musicians and nonmusicians when they created  
five-note melodies. He found that the amount of novelty in the  
melodies was the same for musicians and nonmusicians, and that  
musicians were not activating more music-related areas of the brain.  
But he found that "musicians were turning off a part of the brain,"  
involved in "a special type of attention," he said. It was a different  
area from what Dr. Limb was studying, but the implication is similar.  
The fact that this area gets inhibited when musicians play enables the  
performers to tune out a cellphone ring in the audience or noise from  
a malfunctioning amplifier, Dr. Berkowitz said.

Asked how, when performing music, he balances the ideas and feelings  
in his head with the external stimuli of the audience, the place he is  
performing, and extraneous sounds, Mr. Metheny explained his approach.  
He respects and appreciates the audience, but "I'm playing for myself  
– anything other than that would be a guess," he said. "If you start  
worrying about what critics say, or a record company, or the audience,  
then you get paralyzed. The only thing I know for sure is what I love."

Mr. Metheny said that when he plays, "to a certain degree I remain  
somewhat detached emotionally; I'm kind of listening" and thinking at  
various points, "if I was listening to this, which I am, what would I  
like the guitar player to play next? And I would do it, or sometimes I  
would do the opposite. The best musicians are not the best players,  
they're the best listeners."

But even Mr. Metheny's decades of experience doesn't give him the  
ability to always play the notes he wants to. "You've told me that  
actually the music coming out of the guitar is not nearly as good as  
what you're hearing in your head," Dr. Limb said.

"It's actually quite far away from that," Mr. Metheny said.

Dr. Marcus, who is not a musician but took up the guitar two years  
ago, said he realized how liberating it was to make up music and that  
improvising "tells us a lot about how we learn things and what we can  
get good at." He displayed an app he created that allows people to mix  
and match musical elements as a kind of half-machine, half-man method  
of improvising and composing.

"One of the things you start to realize is that anything starts to  
sound more musical when you hear it again," he said. The mixture of  
consistency and variability, like having a steady beat but changing  
the melody, he said, is why "music is as powerful as it is." . . .

Maybe improvisation is not just the culmination of many learned  
abilities, but a sophisticated coordination of skills that reflects  
something critical about the way human brains work, the scientists and  
musician seemed to be saying.

"Lately," Mr. Metheny said, "I've been thinking about jazz not so much  
as a destination but as a process, but even more than that as a  
symptom."