Musical choices during group free improvisation: A qualitative psychological investigation

Methods

Qualitative methods were appropriate to the exploratory aims of this study (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor, & Tindall, 1998). Since the study aimed to capture any divergence in construction of musical meaning between participants in the same musical event, individual interviews were used to avoid the negotiation of consensus views (Barbour, 2005). In previous interviews with improvisers, however, we have found a tendency to generalise experience. “Think aloud” interviewing (Fonteyn, Kuipers, & Grobe, 1993) requires that interviewees voice their thought processes as they complete a specific task, for instance reflecting on transcriptions of their audio diaries, or, in arts research, examples of their practice, giving the data a sharper focus. In the present study, a video recording of a musical interaction was used as a referent around which to structure participant interview immediately afterwards, making interviewees’ accounts more specific and comparable (cf. Bastien & Hostager, 1988; Doffman, 2011; Schober & Spiro, 2014).

Three trios of improvising musicians and two of visual artists working with sound performance were sought, this format allowing an optimal balance of complexity of interaction and scope for individual participation. Performers from other arts backgrounds than music were included to reflect the diversity of contemporary practice in free improvisation. Participants, all adults, were recruited through personal contacts and snowballing, proceeding from improvising musicians based in Scotland and an ensemble of visual artists performing with voices based in the North East of England. It was intended that at least half the sample comprise improvisers not previously known to the first author (GW). Purposive sampling aimed to recruit both male and female improvisers from varied musical and artistic backgrounds, and to recruit performers on a range of instruments including voice and electronics.

The nature and purpose of the study were explained to potential participants before requesting their written consent; none of those approached declined to take part. Participants were asked to improvise freely two trio performances of approximately five minutes each in the recording studio of an academic music department; one trio was recorded at the participants’ convenience in their institution’s studio. To ensure that this constituted musical rather than verbal interaction, participants were asked not to discuss what was played beforehand or between the recording and the interview, and none of the trios communicated verbally during the improvisations. Performances, lasting between four and nine minutes, took place at separate times with no trio hearing another’s performance. Each performance was video and audio recorded by GW, who was present throughout without commenting; audio examples can be accessed at https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.7488/ds/285. From the longer recordings, GW selected a five-minute section for the interviews. Table 1 gives details on the musicians and instrumentation of each trio with their self-reported musical background, indicating the diversity of musical approaches between them. Four of the 15 indicated in their interviews that they had undertaken higher education in music; six were currently working or studying in music departments. All were currently active as performers of improvised music.

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Table 1.

Participant details.

Trio	Participant	Gender	Instrument	Self-identified background
1	A	M	Bowed object	Classical electronic music
	B	F	Violin	Classical musician
	C	M	Synthesiser	Bands and DJing
2	A	M	Amplified objects	Improviser
	B	M	Amplified objects	Rock band/visual artist
	C	M	Electric guitar	Bands
3	A	F	Voice	Visual artist/choirs
	B	F	Voice	Visual artist/choirs
	C	M	Voice	Bands
4	A	M	Voice	Visual arts/theatre/choirs
	B	F	Voice	Visual artist/choirs
	C	F	Voice	Visual artist
5	A	M	Alto saxophone	Classical musician
	B	M	Electric guitar	Jazz musician
	C	M	Electric guitar	Classical musician

Participants were individually interviewed directly after performing by GW or, in one case, a research assistant, without other trio members present. In three of the trios, participants were co-present while waiting to be interviewed, but were engaged in unrelated tasks (rehearsing or meeting). After a brief account of their overall practice, each improviser talked through a replay of their improvisation, stopping as necessary, to explain what they understood to be communicated by their own and other improvisers’ contributions (see the interview guide in Supplemental Material Online). Interviews (mean length 48 minutes, range 34 to 74 minutes) were audio recorded and transcribed anonymously for analysis. The qualitative data were analysed using the grounded theory approach of constant comparison (Henwood & Pidgeon, 2004): the researchers read transcripts repeatedly to identify recurring themes and key musical signifiers. Selected passages were submitted to discourse analysis of how interviewees orient towards particular expectations of themselves and others.

Results

Options perceived when improvising

One problem in trying to model psychological processes in free improvisation is players’ apparent rejection of guiding principles; their determination to avoid pre-existing musical forms leaves the observer unsure what form an improviser’s contributions might take in any given performance, or whether any recurring features could be expected. Choices made while improvising were therefore a focus of interest in the interviews. As they talked through the recording, interviewees’ descriptions of their involvement suggested a hierarchy of options. Asked to indicate what was taking place at any given moment in the video, they defined their activity and others’ in terms of parameters (e.g. playing long notes, making brief arrhythmic sounds, repeating a short motif, or remaining silent), within which there might be variations of pitch or volume. At a primary level, they faced an ongoing choice of whether to maintain the parameters of their own current activity, or to change these:

The fact that I’m just keeping that note there I knew at some point they would both be like “Ok he’s going to do something in a minute.” You keep that idea going and the chances are that at some point you’re going to move away from it… I think it empowers you to be the person who does the next change. If you keep doing the same thing people know that you’re probably going to do something quite dramatically different. [5A]

5A’s quote exemplifies this active and iterative consideration, relative to the ensemble, of whether to keep playing what he was or move on to something different. The decision to maintain could reflect either a participant’s perception that there was no need to modify what was currently taking place; or that the participant could not identify a suitable change to make at present, and was “treading water”:

I think I was actually slightly, what’s the word, not put off by what 3C was doing, but discombobulated by what 3C was doing and I think I was trying to work out how to interact with that. So I think I was more “okay, what do I do with this?” So I just waited to think about it. [3B]

Interviewees characterised change in what they were doing during the improvisation either as an initiative, something new that they had chosen to instigate, or as a response to someone else’s contribution to the improvisation. Initiatives were understood either to introduce a new idea or theme, or to transform an element of what was currently being played. For instance, a participant in the second group gave this account of a change in the sounds he was making at one point:

I remember that bit where it got noticeably louder being aware that, oh hello, things are a bit louder than often when I improvise … and I’ve maybe thought I could exert some control over it by that kind of [makes noise] had a real kind of final part to it as if right, we’re moving on to something else from here. … I think both those guys stopped and then 2B used it as a springboard to go, there’s a brief gap and then you noticed that 2B came in with that rubbing sort of crackety-crackety-crack-type noise. [2A]

2A describes his sound as an initiative: an exertion of control consciously intended to bring an end to what had been taking place and introduce “something else” to the improvisation. He characterises subsequent changes by the others in the trio as a response to his action, using it as a “springboard”.

Further distinctions were made within the category of response. These were coded into three emergent categories, which can be labelled as: adoption, augmentation and contrast. An adoptive response involved making contributions that were substantively similar to those of another player, in terms of rhythm, pitch, motif, etc. In the example below, participant 1C describes an instance where all three members of the trio adopt on their own instruments the “squeakiness” initiated by 1A:

Certainly at the end of it you can hear this sort of squeaky sound that I’m making, that’s quite suggested from 1A’s [object] squeaking, but then 1B’s on it really quickly as well so we just all hit the squeakiness. [1C]

An augmentative response involved a contribution that adopted some aspect or aspects of what another player was doing, but diverged from that player in other respects; for instance, adopting another’s rhythmic pattern but varying the pitches or choosing a very different register. This was intended to enhance or develop what the other improviser was doing in a distinct way:

… it’s just building that idea and throwing in a few more textual anomalies. In keeping with what the guitars had been doing previously, really, with the long harmonics and the “bup bup bup” sort of stuff. [5A]

Responses were coded as contrasting where interviewees played something substantively different from another improviser, but claimed the difference between these two sounds as an aesthetic objective for the improvisation at that point. For instance, a player in the second trio gave this account:

… just holding the slide down on the strings, it can make a sort of like big noisy, droney sort of sound, and I thought that might sound quite good with this sort of constant chattering of the glasses box chattering. [2C]

2C recognises another player’s sounds (“constant chattering”) as a dominant motif that he chooses to complement with a contrasting sound (“big, noisy, droney”); he does not see the guitar sound as a proposed new direction, but as an embellishment of sounds already in play. Contrasting responses could also be positioned explicitly as accompaniment, supporting or contextualising the improvisation of others, for instance providing a constant tone or bass line under a higher pitched pattern of sounds. In the example below, 3C characterises the “burbling sounds” from himself and another improviser as being expressly “underneath” the very different sounds from the third member of the trio:

… that’s sort of leaving space for 3B to sit over the top of that with what she’s doing which is nice. So she’s providing the textures. We’re providing the undercurrent of burbling nonsense underneath it. [3C]

It is worth noting that initiative and contrast are distinguished here as discrete strategies from the subjective perspective of the improviser. The first is a choice to offer new material unrelated to what others are doing to take the improvisation in a new direction, while the second is a decision to provide material in accompaniment to another improviser’s contribution but which does not share characteristics with it. Nevertheless, it is not clear on what basis a listener or another improviser would identify a contrasting sound as either an accompaniment or a new direction. In the comment above from 2C, even though 2C explains his guitar drone as a sound that complemented the ongoing “chattering”, a listener or one of the others in the trio might have heard his drone as an attempt to bring something new to the music. As such, whatever the intention of the person providing an initiative or contrast, another improviser or listener is faced with an interpretive choice as to which of these options they are hearing. A representation of this process of choice is given in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Model for the process of individual choice during group musical improvisation.

The representation is of an open-ended iterative cycle where all choices lead to a subsequent reconsideration, with each trio member constantly “scanning” the emergent sound of the piece and actions of their collaborators. The improvisation was sometimes characterised by interviewees as an external entity or process, within which events arose independently of those creating it. For instance, participant 3C said of one point in his trio’s improvisation:

That comes out of where we’re all back in it there, rather than anyone in particular leading that section. It’s developing and it’s rising of its own accord, really. So it’s become its own beast there. It’s got a life of its own at that point rather than being pushed. It’s suddenly on a downhill, it’s got gravity behind it, running away with itself rather than having to force it in one direction or the other. [3C]

The improvisation is described as a thing, or “it”, shaping itself, rather than arising from the conscious efforts or influence of those taking part. This indicates that improvisers could perceive themselves as having more or less agency in relation to the music from moment to moment, and therefore more or less capacity to exercise the choices outlined above.

Conclusion

In this paper we have examined how 15 free improvisers account for their recorded trio improvisations, to identify the bases on which they choose and evaluate their contributions. The emergent model (Figure 1) suggests that, on an iterative basis, improvisers choose whether to maintain what they are doing or else change. Change involves a choice either to initiate a new direction or to respond to another improviser. Responses were subjectively understood to adopt, augment or contrast the contributions of others within the ensemble. Each individual’s choices were justified with reference to a number of evaluative dimensions of the music: texture, rate of initiatives, and degrees of novelty and diversity, as well as structural and practical concerns and the participant’s experience of enjoyment. The results also indicate that improvisers within an ensemble do not always perceive themselves as having agency in the direction of the improvisation. Their evaluative processes were shaped by the social context and the tastes and identities they constructed for other members of the group.

Many of the processes described in our analysis will be familiar to free improvisers. Indeed, some strategies devised for improvisers by composers reflect aspects of this hierarchy of choices. Lewis’s score Artificial Life (2011), for example, gives ensemble members the choice to adopt or contrast what someone else is playing at certain points. However, a score sets out explicit instructions. Our model is derived from inductive analysis of the gathered views of individuals improvising together as the most parsimonious account of their psychological processes, and one radically different from that in existing literature. Their choices suggest a focus on larger structural aspects of the music as it emerged, such as overall texture or need for, and rate of, change. Yet participants did not recognise themselves as adhering to stylistic constraints or relying on internalised figures, as cognitive theorists stipulate (e.g. Johnson-Laird, 2002); indeed, some purposefully disavowed learned or familiar material. Why then are free improvisers’ choices not overwhelmed with an infinite array of options?

Our model extends existing theories by suggesting their choices may be narrowed in three alternative respects. First, the option to maintain what is being played allows the generation of new material to be deferred. Bebop soloists by convention generate a continuously novel melody over recurring harmonic sequences. Roles and musical structures within a free improvising ensemble are more flexible and can encompass periods of relative stasis in pitch, rhythm or harmony, such as the “long harmonics” referred to by participant 5A. Second, the option to respond to another’s improvisation constrains choice to material perceived as consistent with that other contribution. Thus, when participant 1C chose to respond to another’s “squeakiness”, his options were constrained to adopting only that sound or sounds he regarded as compatible. Third, improvisers’ perceived options are narrowed by the identities they construct for their fellow improvisers; they choose to play or sing material that they view as consistent with fellow improvisers’ musical tastes and objectives. Participant 3B, for example, observed that his trio tended to avoid consistent rhythm; he might have perceived different expectations improvising with someone else.

In other improvising contexts than jazz, then, change may be more interspersed with stasis, and choices limited by contingent constraints arising from the music and individuals specific to that situation. At points in a free improvisation where an individual must modify material rapidly, their choices are narrowed and thus facilitated by focusing on the contributions and perceived preferences of others in the group, highlighting the importance of psychosocial dynamics rather than any reducible musicological features (Linson et al., 2013). Subjective constraints reflect the rejection by Schober and Spiro’s (2014) participant of objective criteria for success in improvisation, and can develop the understanding of group creativity as a “series of differentiated moments” with distinct resource requirements (Doffman, 2011, p. 223). Although research tends to focus on events within group improvisation, our findings highlight the interplay of stasis and change: a potential for change does not mean that it will always be chosen. For instance, sustained sounds predominate drone-based improvisations, but are still subject to constant ongoing review by the improvisers. Participants also attended to the perceived rate of change, suggesting that they negotiate an optimal rate of innovation rather than the maximal rate proposed by Bryan-Kinns and Hamilton (2009).

A theory of improvising that understands constraints as essentially socially constructed and context-specific does not preclude jazz. Maintaining a swing feel or particular scale choices allows jazz improvisers to make what they play identifiable with this genre. However they engage the same underlying process as free or other improvisers while doing so, even if the latter make no concessions to the parameters of jazz: they review the group’s music as it unfolds, choosing to make initiatives or respond to other musicians. A trumpeter playing a jazz solo may choose a higher rate of initiatives than an accompanist. But they may also choose to adopt a drummer’s rhythm, or indeed to contrast whatever the others do with sustained “squeakiness”. A choice not to “squeak” may be driven by a perception that their group is engaged in playing jazz, and by their social construction at that moment that “squeakiness” is not jazz; but options to play non-jazz things exist as much for them as for any other improviser. In Archer’s terms, constraints are a feature of the structure of a genre, while the choices made by an improviser arise from the individual agency they would have in any generic context (Archer, 2003). As a process separate from but interacting with genre practices, improvisation can indeed be considered a universally applicable model. This is important in the development of a genre; parameters can only change over time through the initiatives of individuals intent on playing something different.

The findings challenge the conception of improvisation as an unbroken creative stream emanating from an individual soloist (Clarke, Doffman, & Lim, 2013; Wilson & MacDonald, 2012). Participants’ perceptions of their improvisation as an external entity in the course of playing suggests a process in which individuals relinquish some agency at times, contributing a nuanced understanding of an essentially interpersonal creativity (Hallam & Ingold, 2007; Sawyer, 2006). Maintaining a constant sense of an ongoing piece and adjusting that vision as it unfolds in unexpected directions or dimensions is consistent with physical changes observed at points of structural change during improvisation (Bryan-Kinns, 2013). The unforced and detached feeling described, for example, by participant 3C, seems consistent with flow states recognised in improvisation literature (Biasutti & Frezza, 2009; MacDonald & Wilson, 2006). Yet flow is typically taken to imply heightened rather than reduced agency; future research might usefully explore how agency is manifest within group improvisation, or the relevance of theories of other group phenomena such as social loafing (Karau & Williams, 1993). We believe this is also the first study to observe and invite improvisers’ comments on a trio interaction, highlighting the more commonly investigated dyad as an insufficient basis for theories about improvisation at large. Conversational behaviour within a group changes depending on its size (Fay, Garrod, & Carletta, 2000), and it would be useful to consider at what size of ensemble improvisatory behaviour changes (Schober & Spiro, 2014), for instance breaking into sub-groups.

Reflexive considerations apply to our interpretation. The participants knew other trio members; as such they may have avoided appearing disparaging in their comments, though it was stressed that interviews would be anonymised and kept confidential. All of the trios were convened from larger existing groups, and therefore represented a novel environment. However, part of the appeal of free improvisation is in the potential for strangers to create music spontaneously; many free improvisation performances are programmed as unprecedented collaborations. The improvisers also commented that they had felt “watched” while performing. Some commented that awareness of a time limit had perhaps meant they played more busily than usual, or had lacked the opportunity to “think in larger structures”. Although the recording was not a “natural” performance, a generalisable setting for free improvisation may be unrealistic. One participant (2A) commented that all performing contexts had varying influences; for instance he worried about “infringing on other people’s time” in certain venues. Finally, GW, as a researcher and improviser, may have been viewed as seeking or valuing particular accounts of improvisation, in line with the psychological construct of demand characteristics (Orne, 1962). 2C’s response regarding slide-guitar playing certainly indicates an assumption of knowledge shared with the interviewer, and both authors’ professional backgrounds must be understood as aligning them with free improvisation. Our subjective stance is nevertheless consistent with our aim to develop theory on how free improvising musicians express their objectives and decisions within a shared instance of practice. Further consideration of the words of free improvisers by researchers less inclined towards free improvisation might compound the understanding gained here with a distinct interpretation.

This study has addressed a recent call to consider improvisation in genres other than jazz, in situations where improvisers know each other, and where improvisers are co-present in a “live” playing situation (Schober & Spiro, 2014). Examining a broader range of improvisatory practice indicates that while “objective” constraints are specific to genre, subjective constraints characterise group improvising as a universal practice. It would be informative for future research to apply this model to free improvisation in mainstream music therapy to consider its correspondence to Wigram’s (2004) categories of therapeutic improvisatory options (MacDonald & Wilson, 2014b).

Our findings highlight that while psychological research has tended to identify a fixed locale of practice as the subject of enquiry, innovation in unforeseen directions is not only the objective of free improvisation (Linson et al., 2012), but of development across all the arts. Practice is always driven by taste in a chaotic system. Psychological research must recognise that processes appearing consistent across improvisations may only appear stable if certain cultural tropes become established through social relations; they remain subject to transformation if tastes change.