Marathon Composers: Jazz Musicians & Creativity
By Samuel Harley
Upon entering my high school jazz ensemble, I remember feeling more anxiety than ever before while performing music. Sure, the symphony orchestras demanded perfection, recitals gave me horrible stage fright, and we had to wear those terribly embarrassing uniforms for marching band- but none of that came close to the fear of having to become a composer at the drop of a hat. However, years would pass, alongside thousands of out-of-key notes and awkward phrases, and I would grow to love the art of musical improvisation. I would improve, little by little, forming associations between each note in each key in each progression — learning which ones to toss out and which ones to hold back, the ones to slam into and the ones to slide passed — and anything else I could do to get myself to feel the chills of a beautiful passage.
But how was I doing this? What gave me these sensations of chills and that attention-grabbing excitement? With endless combinations of notes and rhythms, how was I able to come up with something different and (mostly) decent sounding each time? The answer may lie in the research of neuroscientists at Wesleyan University.
In their paper (1), neuroscientists Przysinda et al. compared jazz improvisers, non-improvising musicians, and non-musicians to determine their abilities to engage in divergent thinking (as a means of assessing creativity) and preferences for unexpected chord progressions. Creativity is functionally defined as the ability to create material that is new, unusual, high quality, and appropriate (2). The ability to be creative is believed to originate as a result of many interactions among known mental processes along with material presented from society, culture, and the creator themselves (3). In divergent thinking tasks like the one used in the present study, participants are given open-ended verbal prompts (e.g. “List all the ways you could use a brick.”) with a response time limit, and assessed based on their number of appropriate responses. It has previously been found that jazz improvisers are particularly good at these tasks, as well general openness to new experiences, even when compared to other musicians (4).
But how does divergent thinking relate to creativity? While the exact brain processes are still unclear, there is a strong body of recent evidence suggesting that the ways our brains process unexpected events are crucial to creative behaviors (5, 6). As a result of this, we would expect to see jazz musicians show greater brain responses to unexpected events compared to that of non-improvising musicians and non-musicians- and this is exactly what was found (1).
By analyzing a brain wave pattern called P3, which has been linked to both generalized expectation violations and that of musical harmony (7,) using EEG (electrical activity from the brain that can be measured on the surface of one’s head), these scientists found that jazz improvisers preferred less expected chords in a chord progression compared to that of classical musicians and non-musicians. The same study also found that both jazz and classical (non-improvising) musicians were better at a divergent thinking task compared to non-musicians.
This research supports the notion that musicians have an increased sensitivity to expectations, increased engagement to unexpected events, and higher degrees of creativity.
After years of jazz education and learning how to improvise, I feel as though I have a great deal more confidence in composition and arrangement for all genres of music. Outside of music entirely, perhaps I’ve gained a greater ability to creatively solve problems and think divergently. Regardless, improvisation has without-a-doubt made me a better musician- and now, when I go to practice and perform music, I can’t help but think of all the ways I’ve grown.
By constantly performing music and learning the meaning behind the patterns of chords that come one after the other- perhaps musicians become bored, developing a stronger appreciation for the unexpected. In regards to improvisers, the need to entertain an audience with a barrage of notes demands a pristine knowledge of what the audience expects so that such can be diverted. By mastering this art of unpredictability, performers are able to capture the audience’s attention and deliver something new and exciting, just like an unexpected gift from a loved one. This same principle can be applied to all human creativity — in order to make something new and exciting, we must first master what is expected, and then learn how to provide something entirely new. Perhaps, then, with sufficient music and jazz education, we can help to bring about a new generation of people with the tools they need to create a better world.
References:
1. Przysinda, E., Zeng, T., Maves, K., Arkin, C., & Loui, P. (2017). Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity. Brain and Cognition, 119, 45–53.
2. Sternberg, R. J., Lubart, T. I., Kaufman, J. C., & Pretz, J. E. (2005). Creativity. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G. Morrison (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. (pp. 351–369). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
3. Goldenberg, J., Mazursky, D., & Solomon, S. (1999). Toward identifying the inventive templates of new products: A channeled ideation approach. Journal of Marketing Research, 36(2), 200–210.
4. Benedek, M., Borovnjak, B., Neubauer, A. C., & Kruse-Weber, S. (2014). Creativity and personality in classical, jazz and folk musicians. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 117–121.
5. Kleinmintz, O. M., Goldstein, P., Mayseless, N., Abecasis, D., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2014). Expertise in musical improvisation and creativity: The mediation of idea evaluation. PLoS One, 9(7).
6. Wiggins, G. A., & Bhattacharya, J. (2014). Mind the gap: An attempt to bridge computational and neuroscientific approaches to study creativity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8.
7. Trainor, L. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2016). The neurobiology of musical expectations from perception to emotion. In S. Hallam, I. Cross, & M. Thaut (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of music psychology., 2nd ed. (pp. 285–305). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
8. Images Used: Colorful Brain & Trumpet on Chalkboard
