Monthly Archives: May 2011

We all make a myriad of decisions each day of our lives. Many are made on the spur of the moment. What coat do I grab as I run out of the house in the morning? What route do I take for my drive to work today? Do I hit the brake or the gas pedal at this yellow traffic light? In this sense, we largely improvise our way through life. But when you think about it, some of these decisions we make are pretty sophisticated. We draw on our past experiences, our accumulated knowledge, and our perception of current conditions. And we do so incredibly quickly. Especially in the case of that yellow traffic light.

Improvised music may be one of the most sophisticated forms of human decision-making. Great improvisers can create a melody that, only moments before, they didn’t know they were going to produce. So in this sense, musical improvisation is undeniably spontaneous. Yet with closer consideration, we can see that improvisation is not entirely unplanned and without preparation.

The music that skilled improvisers make is preceded—if only by a split second—by the idea or intention to make it. Such musician don’t accidentally play that beautiful melody that fits the moment perfectly. It may be unrehearsed, but it’s not random. They are expressing themselves. The amazing thing is that they’re able to generate a musical idea so instantaneously, and do it repeatedly, and so quickly that each idea in succession is but a fleeting thought.

How do musicians come up with ideas that sound good in the moment? The ability to generate such ideas comes from much exposure to the style of music they’re playing or singing in. Musical improvising is necessarily preceded by much music listening. There are some great books out there about improvisation, and some great music teachers who can lead you through some great exercises. But these things are merely supplements to the requirement of doing lots and lots of listening.

But having ideas of what to do is only part of the process. How do ideas actually get realized…and so effortlessly at that? To explore this, let’s jump outside of music for a moment (as you can probably tell, I enjoy applying musical concepts to other aspects of human experience, and vice versa!). Let’s look to the world of comedy. In his book Blink, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell spends several pages considering the workings of an improv comedy group. He describes a team of comedians who can bring an audience to tears of laughter with a skit presented so smoothly that you’d swear they rehearsed it for days. Yet he clearly explains how “improv isn’t random or chaotic at all” but rather “an art form governed by a series of rules.” Gladwell maintains that within group improvisation like this, the amazing spontaneity is the result of hours of practice. The members of the troop have never rehearsed the specific skit that plays out for the audience in that moment, but they’ve all done things like it many times before. He states it articulately: “How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.”

To become a fluent musical improviser, you need to practice. But the meaning of practice here is broader than is often used by many musicians. Improvising can be developed by formal practice or by more informal means. Formal practice might entail repeating scales, arpeggios and other motifs, in order to build a repertoire of patterns that is so assimilated that they can be drawn from immediately while improvising. But practice for improvisation can also be informal, and done in more authentic musical contexts. Many young musicians develop their improvising skills by simply jamming together, messing around while playing a vibe, and just “noodling” on their instruments constantly. There’s also a kind of middle ground between formal and informal practicing, such as when aspiring jazz musicians learn other performers’ improvised solos from recordings. (This is sometimes called transcribing a solo, although they don’t necessarily write it down.) They apply a deliberateness to this exercise that’s reminiscent of formal practice, but the material is definitely authentic music.

So although the specific contents of any single improvisation are created on the spot, that music does not happen without advanced preparation and planning. But by the time skilled improvisers hit the stage, they’ve logged a great deal of that preparation (through listening and practice), such that the planning or “ideating” happens almost reflexively. Jazz great Charlie Parker is said to have offered this advice: “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

We’re all fluent improvisers. The most common way is our speaking. Everyday we talk with family members, friends, teachers, students, and even strangers. And we do it all without a script. Our spoken words are not rehearsed, but they effectively express our thoughts and feelings. A spontaneous conversation is anything but mindless. It’s probably in such improvised interactions that our minds are most engaged—listening to others’ words, reacting emotionally to what we hear, and offering heart-felt opinions of our own. But despite being accomplished improvisational talkers, many of us have not developed this aspect of our musicianship. In a recent poll, I asked my website visitors what music performance skill they would most want to improve. As I type this, improvising is the clear leader (the poll’s are always open!).

This speech analogy may in fact be very similar to the processes of musical improvisation. A few months ago, I caught Charles Limb’s TED Talk “Your Brain on Improv” (the video is embedded at the end of this post). Dr. Limb is a hearing specialist, surgeon, and brain researcher. He’s also a musician. In his talk, he shares—quite eloquently, I might add—some exploratory research he’s doing with musicians who are skilled improvisers. The participants in his research carry out two different performance tasks: playing a memorized jazz solo and improvising an original one over the same chord changes. The kicker is that they do this in a functional MRI scanner, which captures images of activated areas of the brain.

Although Dr. Limb is careful to state that his findings are preliminary, they are nonetheless fascinating to me. They suggest that certain areas of the brain are much more active during improvisation than they are when playing music from memory. More specifically, the areas of the brain that are more active in improvisation are those thought to be autobiographical, including language centers for expressive communication. What’s more—and this is really cool—some areas drop in activity from memorized performance to improvisation. The area of the brain that essentially turns off is an area thought to be involved in self-monitoring.

Dr. Limb’s theory is that what enables these improvisers’ creativity is a “weird dissociation in the frontal lobe” of the brain. While self-expression needs to be boosted, inhibition needs to be reduced. In his words, “You’re willing to make mistakes. You’re not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses.” In effect, what facilitates improvisation is more thought of one kind, but also much less thought of another kind. Incidentally he also found similar brain activity in expert rappers engaged in improvised “freestyle” rapping, compared to when they recited an equivalent memorized rap.

As I try to apply these ideas to music making, a couple things come to mind. First, in order to be a fluent improviser, musicians must develop the capacity to be spontaneously self-expressive. Back to the language analogy. Just as we can quickly choose and combine words to communicate our thoughts at any moment, musicians must possess a similar command of their musical instrument in order to be expressive on it. And like learning a language, this kind of fluency is only acquired through much aural experience. But a second important point is that performers must also be able to shut down the self-consciousness that can interfere with genuine expressiveness. This brings to mind the motivation concept of self-efficacy, that a person must not only be competent with a particular skill, but must believe in their competence. So in addition to developing the ability to improvise, musicians must also learn to trust in this growing musicianship. This can be an elusive goal, considering how so much music instruction is based entirely on error-detection (i.e., “let me tell you what’s wrong with what you’re doing”).

I think there’s much to be gained by studying the processes of improvisation. Whether it comes by interviewing amazing musicians or by scanning their brains in action, I’ll eagerly accept the insight gained. As Dr. Limb says in the video below, “Artistic creativity is magical, but it’s not magic.”