Jazz Improvisation as a Model of the Creative Process : Heightened Perceptual Awareness and Sensitivity

The process of creativity entails the production of novel and original work that takes into account the domain, the field, and the creator (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Here we report recent theoretical and empirical advances on jazz improvisation as a model for understanding the process of creativity. We propose a framework by which musicians can learn to become creative improvisers via simultaneous perceptual, cognitive, and social engagement. These learning processes translate to gaining active experience with musical structures (such as scales and chords), exposure to established works in the field, and ensemble improvisation with musical peers. Empirically we compare jazz musicians, classical musicians, and nonmusicians in a battery of psychophysical and EEG tasks. The psychophysical task (modified from Navarro Cebrian and Janata (2010)) entails perception and imagery of different musical scales, where participants’ task is to judge whether the final pitch is too high, too low, or in tune. Jazz musicians show higher accuracy and a steeper psychometric function, suggesting heightened sensitivity to mistuned pitches given a tonal context. The EEG task (modified from Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici, and Schroger (2000)) compares expected, slightly unexpected, and highly unexpected chord progressions while participants rate the pleasantness of each chord progression. Given this explicit judgment task we see that the P300, an ERP component known to reflect explicit awareness and target processing, is enlarged during unexpected tonal harmonies for jazz musicians, and furthermore its amplitude is positively correlated with the length of musical training. Taken together, our central theme is that the process of improvisation requires heightened awareness of, and sensitivity to, tonal possibilities within a musical context, which allow the individual to generate novel sequences that are acceptable but original within the domain of jazz music.