[Dixielandjazz] Improvisation & Your Brain

[Larry Walton Entertainment]

Thanks Steve --  I read the article with great interest.  I have said many 
times that I go somewhere else when improvising.  I do not feel the horn in 
my hands nor am I aware of much that is going on around me.... sort of a Zen 
experience.  I find it to be most habit forming and the adrenalin is pumping 
to the point that when the gig is over I can't sleep for many hours.  If it 
has really been successful I am higher than a kite.

This doesn't happen always and sometimes not at all.  I agree with the 
article in that something "shuts off."  I think that does happen but 
something else opens.  I used to describe it as an Alice in Wonderland 
experience through a looking glass.  Sometimes I only look into the looking 
glass but other times I step through it and it's unreal and magic.

I don't picture sound as notes.  I understand some see sound as colors but I 
don't.  The truth is I don't know how I see sound except I do.

I enjoyed the article and I think that whatever I am doing Pat and others 
are doing the same thing.  The only thing that I know for sure is that it 
started happening very early on.
Larry
St.L
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "GIORGI, RIC" <ricgiorgi at sympatico.ca>
To: "Larry Walton" <larrys.bands at charter.net>
Cc: "'Dixieland Jazz Mailing List'" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Monday, June 06, 2011 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Improvisation & Your Brain


> WOW, thank you Steve! A must read Great article.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com
> [mailto:dixielandjazz-bounces at ml.islandnet.com] On Behalf Of Stephen G
> Barbone
> Sent: June-06-11 10:03 AM
> To: Ric Giorgi
> Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Improvisation & Your Brain
>
> 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."
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