Improvisation : Methods and Models

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Improvisation Methods and Models
Jeff Pressing (1987)

• Reviewed by Beomsoo Kim

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Contents

• Introduction
• Theories of musical Improvisation
• Teaching of improvisation
• Oral tradition and folklore
• Intuition and Creativity
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Spontaneous Speech
• Summary

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Introduction Whos Jeff Pressing?

• Composer, performer, and researcher of music,
  performing scientific research in a number of
  areas
• Focusing on motor behavior and skill, cognitive
  science, and the mathematical modeling of
  behavior.
• Until his untimely passing in April 2002 (age
  55), he was for many years head of the Cognitive
  Science Master's Program at the University of
  Melbourne in Australia and senior lecturer in the
  Department of Psychology.

Zalankara (A multicultural Symphony)
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Introduction

• How do people improvise? How learned and taught?
• Dont know exactly, but many have researched in
  psychology and AI fields.
• Explicit cognitive formulation is presented
  (later)
• Performance based, real time based. (see the next
  slide)

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Composition and improvisation

• (http//www.soweirdproductions.com/?page_id286)
• Composition a piece of music embodied in
  written form or the process by which composers
  create such pieces
• Improvisation the creation of a musical work,
  or the final form of a musical work, as it is
  being performed
• Dictionary The art of performing music as an
  immediate reproduction of simultaneous mental
  processes, that is, without the aid of
  manuscript, sketches or memory (Harvard
  Dictionary, pp.351-2)

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Theories of musical improvisation

• Historical surveys in many different music genre
  (western, avant-garde, non-western)
• Western music
• few have the sorts of cognitive insights useful
  in model-building (mostly, for jazz, organ)
• Many authors contributed (but not strongly
  affected to cognitive approach)
• Considered as a vehicle for consciousness
  expansion and the tapping of deep intuitions

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Teaching of improvisaiton

• 1. Improvisation is real-time composition and
  that no fundamental distinction need be drawn
  between the two (pre-Baroque times)
• Ex Keith Jarrets Improvisation album
• 2. Sets out patterns, models, and procedures
  specific to the improvisational situation
• Ex 17-18C Bach, how-to-do-it Books for Jazz

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Teaching of improvisation (Contd)

• 3. Setting of a spectrum of improvisational
  problems or constraints
• Grows thru interactive exercise
• Rhythm, melody, expressive nuance, harmony,
  muscular exercises, imitation,
• Pre-set operations transposition, change of
  tempo
• Musical grammars interrupt-driven
• It has a model

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Teaching of improvisation (Contd)

• 4. Presentation of multiple version of important
  musical entities (motives)
• Variation may be occurred by an appreciation of
  the intrinsic fuzziness of the musical concept
• Imitative self-discovery approach copy and
  practice (same chord progression, )
• Widely used for Jazz and Blues (even Rock)

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Teaching of improvisation (Contd)

• 5. Self-Realization ideas of humanistic
  psychology
• Jaques-Dalcroze Improvisation is the study of
  direct relations between cerebral commands and
  muscular interpretations in order to express
  ones own musical feeling. Performance is
  propelled by developing the students powers of
  sensation, imagination, and memory.
• Suzuki, Czerny, etc. (famous for exercise books)

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Optimal techniques for teaching impro.

• Aural / visual feedback (jazz)
• Bash(1983) compared 3 instructional methods for
  jazz
• 1) standard technical procedure (scale, chord)
• 2) aural perception technique (supplemented)
• 3) historical-analytical treatment (supplemented)
• 3) 2) gt 1)
• Moorman(1984) common emphasis on melodic,
  rhythmic, and harmonic foundation (jazz)

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Optimal techniques for teaching impro.

• Can direct evaluative comments on several levels
  (jazz)
• Technical notes dont fit!
• Compositional Try to develop the motive!
• Metaphor use more space! Follow the flow!
• Pike(1974) projection of tonal imagery (jazz)
• Either reproductive (memory-based) or productive
  (creative)
• Operations repetition, contrast, continuity,
  completion, closure, deviation intuitive
  cognition, prevision

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Optimal techniques for teaching impro.

• Fry (1980, 82,83) interactive composition
• Computer sensing and control device
• Movement of the hands in space

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Oral Traditions and folklore Intro

• Music in notational traditions (written music)
• Music in oral traditions (unwritten music)
• M vs. I True? (No!)
• Much may be composed, taught and performed
  without the use of notation. So, although the
  distinction between written and unwritten music
  is important, it should not be confused with that
  between composed and improvised music.

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Oral Traditions and folklore Intro

• When studying unwritten music, establishing the
  division between the composed and the improvised
  becomes virtually impossible.
• Since no action can be completely free of the
  effects of previous training, how does one
  reliably distinguish learned from improvised
  behavior? (Pressing, 1984, p.345)

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Oral Traditions and folklore

• Underlying unities (narrative grammars)
• Two viewpoints
• Focus on their repetitive and imitative aspects
• Formulaic composition proposals (Milman Parry and
  Albert Lord)
• Ex Oddyssey

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Formulaic composition

• There is no original version (multiform)
• Formula a group of words regularly employed
  under the same metrical conditions to express a
  given essential idea
• Choose repertoire of roughly synonymous formulas
  and expand / delete sub-themes
• Permutation of events
• If a real-time performance, its improvised

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Intuition and Creativity

• Connections with improvisation but unclear
• Concept of intuition
• (Philosophies / Psychology)
• Philosophies 3 historical approaches
• Classical Intuitionism (Bergson)
• Westcott contemporary Intuitionism immediate
  apprehension of certain basic truths
• Positivistic raped inference which produces a
  hypothesis.

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Intuition

• Philosophical perspectives
• Henri Bergson a way to attain direct contact
  with a prime reality (ongoing movement)
  ordinarily masked from human knowledge.
• patterned immobility on prime reality
  (perpetual happening)
• Same stories (music?) are found all over the
  world
• Psychological perspectives on intuition
• Special case of inference (Westcott)
• Combinatorial process operating over preexisting
  connections among elements of different emotional
  sets (containing encodings of life events)

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Creativity

• Intuition subcategory of creativity
• Classification along 3 dimensions
• Thought content visual, auditory figural,
  semantic, symbolic, behavioral info.
• Kinds of operation performed on the content
  cognition, memory, convergent/ divergent
  production, evaluation
• Products units, classes, relations, systems,
  transformations, implications

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Creativity (contd)

• Guilford and Hoepfner(1971) techniques of
  evaluation in problem-solving
• Set of 6 aptitudes for creative thinking
• Fluency, Flexibility, originality, elaboration
  objectively testable
• redefinition, sensitivity to problems
• Brennan(1982) use Guilfords classification
• Low correlation between movement improvisation
  and paper tests of creative ability
• Music performance (refined motor skills) same

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Too large to be investigated completely. So
  better search techniques needed.
• Limitations of AI applying to Improvisation
• very personal, open-ended, sometimes
  contradictory.
• Problem solving technique / knowledge
  representation

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AI problem solving techniques

• Search Technique several variants including
  depth, breadth, best-first
• Problem reduction like brain does
• Both have Time Limitation due to considerable
  back-tracking cannot be real time performance

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AI knowledge representation

• Many ideas involved
• Indexing too artificial
• Conceptual dependency too strongly linked with
  natural language structure
• Hierarchies
• Semantic nets network of nodes (not easy to
  represent)
• Multiple representation axiomatic
  diagrammatic representation (Galernter, 1963)
• Blackboards level of abstractness
• Frame, scripts, stereotypes, rule models

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Spontaneous Speech

• Implications for improvisation
• Analogy between language and music
• Goldman-Eisler, et al.
• Contain pauses, repeats ok
• false starts, delaying syllables (um),
  indicative of real-time cognitive processing
  limitations ?
• Petrie(1983) interference was greater during
  the pauses for peoples speech.

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Summary

• Modeling for improvisation from
• Music teaching / learning (jazz/ classic)
• How to teach improvisation? -gt modeling ideas
• Oral traditions
• Spontaneous speech
• Relations with intuition, but not much with
  creativity
• Musical creativity vs. creativity
• AI technique can be useful

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• Thank you.