This website features a study carried out at. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers they discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.
Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they’re playing it.
Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their laps, the pianists all began by playing the C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.
In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome. They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these notes that they wanted.
Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet.
Since the brain areas activated during memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns, regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.
The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview.
The reason why I found this experiment relevant is because 5 days ago I did a first session of an improvisation workshop that I am leading. The workshop was directed to first year bachelor students who had no or little experience in improvisation; the objective of the sessions, the second being tomorrow, was and still is, start breaking into the musical faculties that allow for sensible music making on the stop. Before the first session, I was expecting that the action research would inform me on what level of complexity the exercises should be, and also, on the balance between drill and creativity.
To my surprise I noted something that this article on-line somehow clarifies. I noticed that the students are not used to, or have not developed the faculty to, think in different patterns, or rather without patterns. I noticed a few things:
1) a tendency to remain in the comfort zone even when this implies to do something different from the guideline of the exercise.
2) a great fear to do something “wrong” or “make mistakes”. As I see it, improvisation as a skill is quite simple, probably the challenge is to learn to deactivate the censorship system.
3) I somehow got the impression that in order to do the kind of exercises I was trying to do, the students would have needed some more liberating experiences in their musical upbringing. I also, felt that I got better musical results when I did this kind of activities with 10-12 year olds, probably because they were less inhibited.
This article has been of great value to me because I used to think that creativity in the liberating sense, did not necessarily have much to do with improvisation,; I still think that improvisation is more about sensibility that liberation; however, I am starting to think that in order to get the mined ready to allow for sensibility, a great deal of liberating and un-inhibiting experience may prepare the territory better.