Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E (...) accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise, we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. (shrink)

The paper presents two empirical cases of expert musicians—a classical string quartet and a solo, free improvisation saxophonist—to analyze the explanatory power and reach of theories in the field of expertise studies and joint action. We argue that neither the positions stressing top-down capacities of prediction, planning or perspective-taking, nor those emphasizing bottom-up embodied processes of entrainment, motor-responses and emotional sharing can do justice to the empirical material. We then turn to hybrid theories in the expertise debate and interactionist accounts (...) of cognition. Attempting to strengthen and extend them, we offer ‘Arch’: an overarching conception of musical interaction as an externalized, cognitive scaffold that encompasses high and low-level cognition, internal and external processes, as well as the shared normative space including the musical materials in which the musicians perform. In other words, ‘Arch’ proposes interaction as a multivariate multimodal overarching scaffold necessary to explain not only cases of joint performance, but equally of solo improvisation. (shrink)

Joint actions typically involve a sense of togetherness that has a distinctive phenomenological component. While it has been hypothesized that group size, hierarchical structure, division of labour, and expertise impact agents’ phenomenology during joint actions, the studies conducted so far have mostly involved dyads performing simple actions. We explore in this study the complex case of collectively improvised musical performances, focusing particularly on the way group size and interactional patterns modulate the phenomenology of joint action. We recorded two expert improvisation (...) ensembles of contrasting sizes and collected data about their musical behaviour, as well as reports about five aspects of their phenomenology and about their musical intentions. Our overall data enabled us to assess how those five phenomenological dimensions related to one another during jointly improvised performances. They also show how such phenomenology varied with the way improvisers dynamically related to one another throughout the performance. Finally, we observe that group size strongly altered the phenomenology of improvisers who otherwise shared many characteristics. Our study thus sheds light on the interactional and structural parameters that shape and modulate our felt experience when acting together, and thereby highlights the importance of pluralism for studying the phenomenology of joint action. (shrink)

It has been hypothesized that postperformance memory gaps occur in highly skilled individuals because experts generally perform their skills without conscious attention. In contrast, we hypothesize that such memory gaps may occur when performers focus so intently on their unfolding actions that their ongoing attention interferes with long-term memory formation of what was previously attended to, or when performers are highly focused on aspects of their bodily skills that are not readily put into words. In neither case, we argue, does (...) performance proceed automatically yet both situations, we suggest, may lead to an inability to recollect performance. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews (...) with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities. (shrink)

In this paper we engage in a reciprocal analysis of situated cognition and the notion of ‘meshed architecture’ as found in performance studies (Christensen, Sutton & McIlwain 2016). We argue that the model of meshed architecture can operate as a tool that enables us to better understand the notion of situated cognition. Reciprocally, by means of this new understanding of situation we develop a richer conception of meshed architecture. This enriched notion of a meshed architecture includes affect and bottom-up, non-automatic, (...) intrinsic control aspects of body-schematic processes and intelligent habits, on a vertical axis, as well as extended, ecological and worldly (material, normative, social, cultural) constraints and affordances on a horizontal axis. This gives us a very productive way to think about how various elements come together in skilled action and performance, but also a detailed way to characterize situated cognition. (shrink)

What does it mean for an actor to empathize with the character she is playing? We review different theories of empathy and of acting. We then consider the notion of “twofoldness”, which has been used to characterize the observer or audience perspective on the relation between actor and character. This same kind of twofoldness or double attunement applies from the perspective of the actor herself who must, at certain points of preparation, distinguish between the character portrayed and her own portrayal (...) effected in her craft. We argue that this concept helps us to understand how the actor can empathize with her character. For the actor who must study and rehearse her character, empathy may begin with higher-order processes that provide a contextualized understanding of the character. This understanding eventually integrates with more basic empathic processes in her actual performance. (shrink)

In exploring skilled performance in Contact Improvisation, we utilize an enactive ethnographic methodology combined with an interdisciplinary approach to examine the question of how skill develops in CI. We suggest this involves the development of subtleties of awareness of intra- and interkinaesthetic attunement, and a capacity for interkinaesthetic negative capability—an embodied interpersonal ‘not knowing yet’—including an ease with being off balance and waiting for the next shift or movement to arise, literally a ‘playing with’ balance, falling, nearly falling, momentum and (...) gravity. We draw on insights from an interdisciplinary approach, including from a developmental perspective concerning the experience of dyadic interpersonal embodied skill development in both infancy and CI. Building on Ravn and Høffding’s definition of expertise in improvisation as an “oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency” we propose that a key aspect of expertise in CI involves oscillation between levels and processes of interkinaesthetic sense of agency. These interdisciplinary insights also elucidate limitations within current conceptualisations of sense of agency, including the relationship between sense of agency and sense of control. (shrink)