Showing posts with label improvisation. Show all posts

Monday, February 7, 2022

IMAGINED JAZZ IMPROV CHANGES THE BRAIN LIKE REAL SINGING

reposted from https://www.futurity.org/jazz-musicians-improvisation-brains-2642832/

IMAGINED JAZZ IMPROV CHANGES THE BRAIN LIKE REAL SINGING

OCTOBER 15TH, 2021POSTED BY NOELLE TOUMEY REETZ-GEORGIA STATE

"What's so fascinating is that we saw very similar brain patterns and activity whether they were actually scat singing or just imagining an improvised performance," Martin Norgaard says. (Credit: David Robert Bliwas/Flickr)

Just imagining improvised performances can elicit the same flow-like states as when jazz musicians are singing, research finds.

For the study, researchers recruited 21 advanced jazz musicians and prompted them to vocalize or imagine one of the four scores from the Bebop era of jazz based on a standard 12-bar blues chordal progression while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The researchers then used the fMRI data to identify how a musician’s brain reconfigures connectivity depending on the degree of creativity required during jazz performances, focusing on two major brain networks: the default mode network and the executive control network.

“We estimated static functional network connectivity as jazz musicians were vocalizing, imagining, improvising, or performing pre-learned, memorized scores,” says principal investigator Victor M. Vergara, research assistant professor at Georgia State University.

LESS BRAIN INTERFERENCE

The work provides new insight into the minds of expert jazz musicians at work, says coauthor Martin Norgaard, associate professor in the Georgia State School of Music.

“What’s so fascinating is that we saw very similar brain patterns and activity whether they were actually scat singing or just imagining an improvised performance,” Norgaard says.

The study builds on previous research demonstrating that subjects’ brains show lower functional connectivity during musical improvisation. The new findings reveal that improvisation is associated with a state of weak connectivity to the brain’s executive control network and to a feeling of “flow,” which allows unhindered musical creation.

“The executive control network is typically active in many tasks, including solving problems. The default mode network seems to be more active when a subject is in the resting state,” says Norgaard. “We saw that when expert musicians are improvising, the brain is interfering less with their creativity.”

The new study allowed researchers to observe widespread and richer effects of connectivity, says Vince Calhoun, professor in psychology and neuroscience and founding director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), which has support from Georgia State, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University.

It is the first analysis of whole brain connectivity during vocalized and imagined real-time production of creative output.

“The brain is highly dynamic, so mapping how brain function changes over time is a much more natural way to analyze the data and capture functional patterns linked to either behavioral conditions or to resting,” Calhoun says.

MORE THAN JAZZ MUSICIANS

As part of the team at TReNDS center, Vergara and colleagues were able to extract signals from the brain using a non-invasive method to reduce any interference in the creative process. The team created a custom algorithm to identify the resting state networks.

“Brain imaging produces vast amounts of time-varying measurements that are difficult to parse. Pattern recognition algorithms were necessary to pinpoint the relevant brain areas involved in the creative process,” says Vergara. “We then compared the different patterns to understand the differences between performing improvisation and pre-rehearsed music.”

The study’s paradigm allows for the inclusion of expert jazz performers with many different instrument specializations, which suggests the results may be broadly applicable to all improvising musicians.

Future research could adapt the same paradigm to other activities where creation happens in real time—like in performing freestyle rap or spoken-word poetry and even playing sports—potentially identifying common threads in the creative process inside the human brain.

“Now there are more specific questions we can consider, like what changes are happening in the brain while someone improvises or which different networks are involved,” says Norgaard. “That’s called dynamic connectivity, and that’s what we’re hoping to research next.”

The study appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: Georgia State University

This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity Date:

reposted from ScienceDaily

from PLOSone

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001679#s4

This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity

Date:: February 28, 2008
Source:: Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Summary:: A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have 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.
Share:

FULL STORY

A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have 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.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

The scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Though many recent studies have focused on understanding what parts of a person’s brain are active when listening to music, Limb says few have delved into brain activity while music is being spontaneously composed.

Curious about his own “brain on jazz,” he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD, devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

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.

Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. 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. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

The study is published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Study of jazz players shows common brain circuitry processes music and language

reposted from

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

19-Feb-2014

[ Print | E-mail ]

[ Close Window ]

Contact: Stephanie Desmon
sdesmon1@jhmi.edu
410-955-8665
Johns Hopkins Medicine

Study of jazz players shows common brain circuitry processes music and language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians 'traded fours'

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics — those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

The results of the study suggest that the brain regions that process syntax aren't limited to spoken language, according to Charles Limb, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Rather, he says, the brain uses the syntactic areas to process communication in general, whether through language or through music.

Limb, who is himself a musician and holds a faculty appointment at the Peabody Conservatory, says the work sheds important new light on the complex relationship between music and language.

"Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," says Limb, the senior author of a report on the work that appears online Feb. 19 in the journal PLOS ONE. "But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language.

"We've shown in this study that there is a fundamental difference between how meaning is processed by the brain for music and language. Specifically, it's syntactic and not semantic processing that is key to this type of musical communication. Meanwhile, conventional notions of semantics may not apply to musical processing by the brain."

To study the response of the brain to improvisational musical conversation between musicians, the Johns Hopkins researchers recruited 11 men aged 25 to 56 who were highly proficient in jazz piano performance. During each 10-minute session of trading fours, one musician lay on his back inside the MRI machine with a plastic piano keyboard resting on his lap while his legs were elevated with a cushion. A pair of mirrors was placed so the musician could look directly up while in the MRI machine and see the placement of his fingers on the keyboard. The keyboard was specially constructed so it did not have metal parts that would be attracted to the large magnet in the fMRI.

The improvisation between the musicians activated areas of the brain linked to syntactic processing for language, called the inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus. In contrast, the musical exchange deactivated brain structures involved in semantic processing, called the angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus.

"When two jazz musicians seem lost in thought while trading fours, they aren't simply waiting for their turn to play," Limb says. "Instead, they are using the syntactic areas of their brain to process what they are hearing so they can respond by playing a new series of notes that hasn't previously been composed or practiced."

###

Along with Limb, other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in the study include Gabriel F. Donnay, B.S.; Summer K. Rankin, Ph.D.; Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Ph.D.; and Patpong Jiradejvong, M.S.

This project was funded by the Dana Foundation and the Brain Science Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

[ Print | E-mail

Share] [ Close Window ]

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.