INSPIRED & REQUIRED

"Music in the soul can be heard by the universe."
                                       ~ Lao Tzu



Continuing my exploration of creativity and how it is handled by the brain, I'm setting my sights, my ears on improvisation, the musical version of innovation.  At the end of the last post on the subject (He Sways While He Plays), Yo-Yo Ma expressed a feeling that the less conscious he was of his playing, the more emotion was expressed in his performance.  Paraphrased by Jonah Lehrer in IMAGINE: How Creativity Works, as 'The Letting Go,' this aspect of performance can be truly scary. It means relinquishing the possibility of perfection and possibly expressing something we did not mean to, the essence of losing control.  This loss of control opens the door for spontaneity, an important part of creativity.  Indeed, many modern compositions would not be in existance without this vital and valuable source of creation.  "[From] John Coltrane's saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.  It's Miles Davis playing his trumpet on Kind of Blue - most of the album was recorded on the very first take - and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall."

There is a Nepalese word that to me, perfectly describes a jazz band in full improvisational glory.  Rungi-chungi jilli-milli means total bombardment on every level, multi-layered chaos, congestion & pandemonius beauty.  What an expressive word (or words).

How does this happen?  By letting go?  By doing essentially nothing?  It does not compute.   These questions are exactly the ones that inspired this blog.  Asking jazz students how they approach improvisation turned out to be a creative free-for-all, with answers all over the board.  Charles Limb, a neuroscientist and self-described music addict, at Johns Hopkins University, has also asked those questions.  In his own words, "How did Coltrane do it?  How did he get up there onstage and improvise his music for an hour or sometimes more?  Sure, a lot of musicians can throw out a creative little ditty here and there, but to continually produce masterpiece after masterpiece is nothing short of remarkable.  I wanted to know how that happened."   Me too.

Limb organized a simple experiment: he was going to watch jazz pianists improvise new tunes while in a fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain scanner.*   Each musician began the experiment by playing passages they knew and required no imagination, a C-major scale, a standard previously-memorized blues tune.  This created the baseline reading for a brain reproducing material it had mastered.  The so-called Creativity Condition was introduced by asking the subject to improvise a new tune, a melody, as they played along with a recording of a jazz quartet.  While they were improvising, the scanner was looking for minor shifts in brain activity.  "The scientists found that jazz improv relied on a carefully choreographed set of mental events.  The process started with a surge of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain that is closely associated with self-expression (Limb refers to it as the "center of autobiography" in the brain).  This suggests that the musician was engaged in a kind of storytelling, searching for the notes that reflected her personal style."  I find that truly interesting.  But it gets better.   "At the same time, the scientists observed, there was a dramatic shift in a nearby circuit, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).  While the DLPFC has many talents, it's most closely associated with impulse control.  This is the bit of neural matter that keeps each of us from making embarrassing confessions, or grabbing at food, or stealing from a store.  In other words, it's a neural restraint system, a set of handcuffs that the mind uses on itself."  Self-control and improvisation: what is the correlation?  Would it make sense to you that during times of experimentation, your brain is eliciting as much control as it can while venturing into new terrain?  Well here's what happened...

"Before a single note was played in the improv condition, each of the pianists exhibited a 'deactivation' of the DLPFC, as the brain instantly silenced the circuit.  In contrast, this area remained active when the pianist played a memorized tune.  The musicians were inhibiting their inhibitions, slipping off those mental handcuffs."  According to Limb, this allowed them to create new music without worrying about what they were creating.  They were letting themselves go.  Wow.  That is a risky and very bold thing to do, especially on stage.  I believe for those that understand the dynamics of jazz, that is a large part of why people are so drawn to live jazz performance.  

It turns out that this is merely the beginning of a particular series of brain events that must occur for successful improvisation.  After the deactivation of the DLPFC, the brain must contrive something interesting to output.  The generation phase of the improvisation process begins with a flood of material, general in the beginning.  But, there are important constraints on the execution of this material, all related to the format of the jazz chart.  As explained in YOUR BRAIN ON JAZZ, the subjects needed to improvise in the right key, the right tempo and the right style (and, if they were playing in a band, to improvise while also incorporating aspects of their bandmates' solos).    

There is another fMRI study conducted at Harvard, where twelve classically-trained pianists were asked to compose original melodies.  While the Limb study compared brain activity during performance of memorized pieces and improvised pieces, this experiment compared activity in the brain during different kinds of improvisation.  "This would allow the scientists to detect the neural substrate shared by every form of spontaneous creativity, not just those bits of brain associated with particular types of music."  They expected the various improv conditions, independent of musical genre,  to lead to a surge in the premotor cortex (musical patterns translated into bodily movements).  But, the surge in the inferior frontal gyrus, most closely associated with language and the production of speech, was a bit of a surprise.  The metaphor of a musical phrase as sentence, where every note is a word, is argued by scientists as using the same mental muscles.  "Those bebop players play what sounds like seventy notes within a few seconds," says Aaron Berkowitz, the lead author on the Harvard study.  "There's no time to think of each individual note.  They have to have some patterns in their toolbox."  This is reminiscent of Dann Zinn's step-by-step instruction process beginning with 2-5-1 Licks (explained in The SINGULAR Dann Zinn) and nearly exactly the "conversational jazz" of Paul Contos (Interview with Paul Contos, director of SFJAZZ).  Berkowitz continues by likening improvisation to learning a second language.  Immersion in jazz, like memorizing vocabulary, nouns, adjectives and verb conjugations, causes a student to internalize "the intricacies of Shostakovich or Coltaine or Hendrix."  After years of this exposure, the process of articulating these musical phrases becomes automatic.  Gone are the worries of consulting scale charts and paying close attention to the proper technical movement of fingers, hands and arms.  It is only after this expertise has been gained that true improvisation can be performed.  Hard work belies the ease they present.   Jonah Lehrer, speaking for 'we' humans, says it best: "This is what we sound like when nothing is holding us back."

* "The giant superconducting magnets in fMRI machines require absolute stillness of the body part being studied, which meant that Limb needed to design a custom keyboard that could be played while the pianists were lying down.  (The setup involved an intricate system of angled mirrors, so the subjects could see their hands.)"

Lehrer, Jonah.  IMAGINE: How Creativity Works. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012.  

Limb, Charles.  "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation."  PLOS ONE: e1679.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679: 2008.

Berkowitz, Aaron & Ansari, Daniel.  "Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation."  Neuroimage 41: 2008, page 535-543.