#musical improvisation

[neurosciencenews]

How jazz improvisation affects the brain

Musical improvisation improves cognitive flexibility and increases inhibitory control.

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/derekbaileyimprovisation/mode/2up

[mikemeanstreetz]

A privilege ina honor to be dragging my tape machines to play along with the LA Freeks in AIRWAY this Sunday night at 8PM @ the Box, on the 2nd night of the BOXstock Los Angeles Free Music Society fatty fest. 805 Traction Ave, LA CA 90013.

[zufoleonardo]

Playlist

Sérgio Villafranca - piano

Toninho Carrasqueira - flauta

[theinfomonkey]

What Goes on in Your Head During Creative Musical Improvisation? Part 2

What Goes on in Your Head During Creative Musical Improvisation? Part 2

This is the second of a two-part article about what goes on in your head when you’re improvising music. In the first part we looked at what’s happening in the brain during creative musical improvisation. In this part we’ll take a speculative look at how the conscious experience of creative improvisation might be tied to what’s happening in the brain.

How do musicians describe what creative…

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[theinfomonkey]

What Goes on in Your Head During Creative Musical Improvisation? Part 1

What Goes on in Your Head During Creative Musical Improvisation? Part 1

This is the first of a two-part article about goes on in your head when you’re improvising music. In this part we’ll look at what’s happening in the brain during creative musical improvisation. In the second part we’ll look at the conscious experience of creative improvisation and tie it to what’s happening in the brain.

The image at the top is from a study published in 2008 by Dr. Charles Limb…

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[withlove-bela]

Improvised~!

[improvoctopus-blog]

Brian Eno On Musical Improvisation

A while back, Brian Eno did an interview with Pitchfork where he talked a bit about musical improvisation and the role it played in the process of recording an album.

If you like Eno, the interview’s worth reading in full. If not, here’s a couple paragraphs, with some added emphasis to highlight the quotes that made me feel like pointing this out in the first place: 

BE:  The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument. Luckily neither Leo [Abrahams] nor Jon [Hopkins] are that kind of person. They like going somewhere they haven't been before. So, I try to make up rules that encourage that. And then of course these improvisations were done to multi-track-- we're working, actually, on Logic-- so, sometimes what we would is we would improvise together for a while then we would listen back and find a section, which may be only a minute long, perhaps, and we'd say "Okay, let's play over that one minute. Let's maybe put that one minute down five times and use that as the basis over which we work." We're improvising, but we're using some sort of structuring ideas as well.

Pitchfork: It sounds like lot of fun. It sounds like a very playful environment where you can just try out things and use your imagination and see what happens.

BE: Yes, that's one of the good things, I think. There's very little feeling of censure between us, very little feeling of, "Oh, that was a bit dark. What'd you do that for?" Try anything. I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time. So, we kind of like to think of structuring devices that make it so that there are differences in dynamics where sometimes only one thing is happening and sometimes several things are happening together. 

Get the point? Sometimes the best thing you can do in a scene is to hang back and let the scene do what it’s doing. Otherwise, you wind up with cacophony. Cacophony’s great if it’s what you want, but if it’s your default state of play, you’re probably not listening enough, which means the audience doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be listening to, which means that you’re not doing a good enough job directing their attention. Slow down, breathe, listen, and you’ll do fine.

Also, just in case you aren’t already familiar with it, here’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports. It’s probably the best music for airports I’ve ever heard: