Improvisation Natures

Where do you start when you improvise?

I ask myself this question quite a bit. Sometimes I have a rhythm going off in my head that I just heard the fridge make. Or I am expressing that rolling melody I’ve hummed to myself since I was a child. Some people have inner dialogues, I have an inner Buddha Machine.

Sometimes I start simply by turning on a particular grouping of gear or place other artificial limitations on what I’m doing. Only use what’s on this table. Only turn on this power strip. Play only what you can reach from your seat. These constraints make me really listen to what I’m doing, I get into a flow, and music emerges that I could have never predicted.

I learned a lot from psychology researcher Gary Klein about the Recognition Primed Decision Model. This area of research is known as Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) and it describes the way our minds forge new pathways of knowledge. Given a new or ambiguous situation, our brains are able to piece together solutions.

Pattern Recognition is another more familiar term for what is thought to happen here. Our minds are not only excellent at perceiving patterns, we also fill in the blanks where the patterns aren’t clear. Some people are better at this than others, but it is a natural response to the environment in the animal kingdom.

An important aspect of this isn’t that we store literal patterns but that our brains embody our experience. These embodiments come out as metaphors when we must express our knowledge as language. When we react to something, like an emergency, the process is far faster. Without any need for translation into language, our learned experience comes out as intuition. Ingenious solutions not clear to anyone else are suddenly at our disposal.

Groups can have intuition, too. This is what both musical and theatre improvisation is all about. Last weekend at ImprovCon, I had the extreme pleasure to see several improv troupes, from local artists to TV actors. It is enthralling to witness the way they collaborate and combine both movement and sound to reshape the world around us.

Musicians are notorious improvisers. In fact, joint cognition between jazz players has been researched quite a bit. One of my favorites is “Cognition in Jazz Improvisation: An Exploratory Study”, by David Mendonça and William Wallace. They dig into how a jazz duo communicates while performing both idiomatic jazz and non-idiomatic “free” improv.

I like to talk a lot about jazz in the context of learning how to work together when responding to incidents. Our signals are different than those passed between musicians but accomplish the same cooperative function. We learn an idiom as a “theory of practice” and learn how to improvise together as a “practice of practice”.

Those words - Practice of Practice - are from guitarist Derek Bailey, improviser and author of an incredible book titled Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. This is an anthropological study of improvisation, spoken from interviews that Bailey had with many different styles of improviser: jazz, organ, baroque, indian, flamenco, rock, free, and more.

When we are improvising, there’s not a way to actually rehearse what we will do. A great irony of how ‘classical music’ stands the test of time in written and rehearsed form is that so much of the original music was completely improvised. At ImprovCon, I showed a picture of Bailey and a quote from the book that I really love:

“Improvisation has no existence outside of its practice”
– Derek Bailey

For this non-technical ImprovCon talk, I wanted to share some building blocks of any kind of group improvisation. For each topic, we all performed a Pauline Oliveros piece: The Tuning Meditation as our first Joint Activity together, followed by Approaches & Departures for getting to know Signals better.

These are examples of us working together on a shared activity where we have agreed to participate, all our actions interconnected. We talked about examples of how humans come together to learn how to improvise in order to respond to incidents, like rescue teams in the Arctic.

Ensieh Roud did a wonderful bit of research on rescuers who practice improvisation as a team to be better prepared for responding in the extremely dynamic conditions of the Arctic; rough seas, sudden weather, shifting icebergs, sudden avalanches. There is also a great series of papers that dig into how construction workers improvise.

Even cross-organizational improvisation is important. Imagine disaster response, where teams from multiple orgs with their own sets of procedures and rules must contend with working together during a fundamental surprise when those rules do not apply.

A thing all these successful teams do is learn how to improvise together. When they do this, they discover things about each other and the resources they have at hand. The simplest definition of “improvisation” is an activity of doing something unplanned using any resources available. It is a solid example of how adaptive capacity comes to bear during novel surprises like accidents… or wrong notes.

There are no wrong notes in jazz,
only notes in the wrong places.
– Miles Davis

David Woods, who researches and teaches Cognitive Systems Engineering, talks about the adaptive universe as having two primary aspects: it is always changing and resources remain limited. Combined with diverse ability to refactor and refocus, we create the conditions for resilient behavior in this universe. Sounds a lot like the situation these improvisers are planning for!

It is the same in music. I may draw upon patterns I already know, but improvisation isn’t about hiding behind patterns. I believe it is more about finding the music in the moment, as Derek Bailey displays over and over again in his interviews. The flow we reach when we are in a high-stakes decision-making mode isn’t based on tricks or magic of having all these memorized patterns in our brain. A lot of it is even muscle memory.

This brings me to an interesting article by author Dan Davies that contrasts my professionally learned approaches to improvisation. I haven’t read much of his other work, full transparency, but have been told that The Unaccountability Machine is quite good. This short piece is on his impressions from an interview with a famous jazz recording artist.

Simply called “ the nature of improvisation”, I have to admit it made me bristle. It espouses the view that improvised music is “a bit of a trick”, “the whole thing is a cheat”, and that “a very small minority” actually improvised “right” and are not “just sticking together patterns and motifs from their memory and repertoire”. These are the words from the jazz musician interview that have stuck with him. I think this attitude clouds what improvisation is really about.

I got deep into the free improvisation scene when living in DC. I made it to The Knitting Factory (West Village version) many times for shows and even performed there. I knew Pauline Oliveros personally and credit her with so much of my own attitude towards improvisation, in music or theatre or running incidents in software.

What Pauline points out, and what Davies is missing, is that the primary way to improvise is to listen. We cycle between attention (to what we are playing) and awareness (of what others are doing) when we are in the flow of improvising. Like the Recognition Primed Decision Model, our musical intuition is not what is stored inside. The improvisation we express is the reflection of how our minds are putting together every moment and intuitively reaching for what comes next based on how we connect with the world around us.

We share in connective labor when we listen. We build community and express empathy when we listen. Most importantly, we expand our discovery envelopes when we listen. I’ll settle the debate: a computer program cannot listen, it is not participating in the act of creation. It cannot participate in connective labor and witness the other human. There is no building empathy, no forging of relationships because we feel seen.

When humans create we are not merely putting together patterns we’ve learned. We are producing a unique perspective of the adaptive universe, always changing. With limited resources we become inspired to improvise, sparking the ingenuity for discovering missing pieces.

And we listen.