Transcript Improvisation

Improvisation
Creativity,
a systems view,
Anarchy
and Zen.
Dan Conway
[email protected]
What we’re going to cover today
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Put improvisation in a wider framework: Creativity.
Examine historical ideas about creativity.
Look at the idea of ‘Swarm Intelligence’.
Complexity, emergent behaviour.
Systems theory.
Inputs into the improvising ‘system’.
What can Distributed Cognition tell us about
improvisation?
• Concepts of Flow.
• Concepts of Zen.
• Concepts of Punk.
What is creativity?
• “Mental processes that lead to solutions, ideas,
conceptualizations, artistic forms… …that are
unique and novel” – Johnson Laird, 1988.
• “…the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts
that are new, surprising and valuable’ – Boden
2004.
Mention: Time, Mendel.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Creativity comes about through a system
consisting of at least these three elements:
▫ A culture that contains symbolic rules.
▫ A person who brings novelty into this sumbolic
domain.
▫ A field of experts who recognise and validate that
innovation.
Improvisation…
Can it be taught / analysed / measured?
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Almost impossible – Borgo, 2006.
One learns ‘intuitively’ – Bailey.
‘…no language to describe it’ – Bailey.
“…we don’t have the language to talk about.” –
Jerry Garcia
• ‘…intrinsically collaborative and inherently
ephemeral.’ – Borgo, 2006.
• ‘…extremely difficult to study empirically’ –
Csikszentmihalyi, 2003.
Whitmer’s ‘General Principles’
• Don’t look forward to a finished and complete
entity. The idea must always be kept in a state of
flux.
• An error may only be an unintentional rightness.
• Do not get too fussy about how every part of the
thing sounds. Go ahead. All processes are at first
awkward and ‘funny’.
• Polishing is not at all the important thing; strive
instead for a rough go-ahead energy.
• Do not be afraid of being wrong; just be afraid of
being uninteresting.
Hultberg, 2000
Organ Improvisation
Interpretation
Edition
Extemporisation
Improvisation
Expansion
Instant
Composition
(free)
Borgo (2006) says:
• Actual processes:
▫ Making ‘offers’
▫ Revoicing
▫ Shelving
Common elements / emergent themes
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Grammar.
Adaptation.
Perpetual Novelty (p21 bongo).
Variety.
Innovation / Experimentation.
Decentralised.
Overlapping authority.
Historic perspective
Philosopher reading, Rembrandt, 1631.
The Thinker, Rodin, 1902.
The individual genius / artist / inventor / scientist / author.
But let’s look closer at the ‘group’
Starlings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE
Fish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYl4m0xFcCU
“…where is the spirit of the hive?”
- Maurice Maeterlink
Super-organism
Swarm
Swarm intelligence
• Devolving rules to lower levels.
• Making rules simple.
• Creating autonomous agents.
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More robust
More flexible
More responsive
Decentralised
“…the music needs
something to happen…”
• Entity is bigger than composer / player.
• Outside of control of composer / player.
But if you make the rules really simple,
doesn’t that result in simple outcomes?
Complexity
• The three body problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_w6JprsXK8
• Non-linear and unpredictable. An engineer may
be searching through a problem space and find
something that solves a completely DIFFERENT
problem – and then go develop that.
• Nonlinearity: Small effects may have large
outcomes, large effects can sometimes be
absorbed (p15 Borgo).
‘Stigmergy’
• Indirect Interaction.
• Where an agent does not communicate directly
with other agents, but instead affects the
environment – which other agents respond to.
Emergent behaviour
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Non-linear dynamics.
Novelty
The unexpected.
Requiring attention.
Increased consciousness of the moment.
Things not possible for an individual.
“… magic.”
-Jerry Garcia
General Systems Theory
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
– Austrian/American Biologist
Kenneth Boulding
– English/American economist
and Social Scientist.
Palo Alto Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Systems theory
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1950’s.
Ecological consciousness.
Holistic thinking.
Emergent behaviour.
The need to address the increasingly ‘silo-ed’ nature of knowledge.
Specialisation.
Networked systems.
Less reductive.
Cross-disciplinary.
Bio-psycho-socio-cultural.
‘General Systems Theory’ - An attempt to make a ‘theory of
everything’.
• Kind of failed…
BUT…
‘All models are wrong.
Some models are useful’.
George E. P. Box
Systems view
• Consider the Environment
• Consider the Group
So where is the music coming from?
Environmental aspects – Cultural scripts
• Indian improvisation.
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All music part improvised/part structured.
The very aim of playing a raga is to update/change the structure.
Rasa = poetical soul of piece, flavour.
Opening onto the Cosmos.
• Spanish improvisation (Flemenco).
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Designed to accompany dancer.
No technical discussion at all.
Totally abstract terms used.
• Jazz
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Idiomatic
Non-idiomatic
Ossified because of breakdown of system – Hubs have become too powerful? Borgo, 2006.
• Rock and 60s Psychedelia.
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Shift of market from single to album allowed artists more room to be creative and experiment.
Long solos.
Bands like The Grateful Dead cultivated an expectation of unpredictable, unstable
performances.
Indian music!!!!
Spirituality!
Altered states of consciousness.
Role of the audience
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Uniquely interactive with artists.
Average faces are more attractive.
Normalising.
Success of an idea or performance is decided
upon between the artist and the audience.
• Social system.
Tension between expected (normative)
and novel.
Distributed cognition
• “The Distributed Cognition approach
emphasises the distributed nature of cognitive
phenomena across individuals, artefacts and
internal and external representations in terms
of a common language of 'representational
states' and 'media'.”
- Rogers, 1997
Distributed cognition
• Includes the role of artifacts.
▫ Eg: calculator, eyeglasses, instruments, texts
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Representational states of information.
Language.
Writing and scores – augmented memory.
Emergent behaviour
Augment our abilities via the presence of others.
Achieve things a single person cannot do.
Our tools are now part of us…
Stockhausen story about flow
Is there time for this?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow
• Intense and focused concentration on the present
moment.
• Merging of action and awareness.
• A loss of reflective self-consciousness.
• A sense of personal control or agency over the
situation or activity.
• A distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective
experience of time is altered.
• Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding,
also referred to as autotelic experience.
Group flow
• ‘…extremely difficult to study empirically.’ Csikszentmihalyi.
• ‘Defies analysis’ – Bailey.
Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead)
“It’s sort of stumbling into this area where there’s a lot
of energy and a lot of something happening and not
a lot of control. So that the sense of individual
control disappears and you are working at another
level entirely. Sometimes this feels to me as though
you don’t really think about what is happening.
Things just flow.”
“…after 25 years of exploring some of these outer
limits of musical weirdness this is stuff that we
pretty much understand intuitively but we don’t
have the language to talk about.”
Zen
Zen Koans
• A monk asked Tozan when he was weighing
some flax: `What is Buddha?'
• Tozan said: `This flax weighs three pounds.'
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Larson, 2012
John Cage
• “Graphic scores require musicians to take on
hair-raising complexities of interpretation. A
musician thus becomes collaborator with the
composer , who shifts some of the responsibility
to other and lets go of a piece of his own ego selfimage. The composer gives up a piece of control.
No performance is ever like another and no idea
of perfection is possible or desired. The
audience is asked to accept uncertainty and
chance – to be open to ‘whatever’.”
Larson, 2012
4’33
“The hall is one body, one mind.
Everybody is awake and full of questions.
What is this silence? Why is it so riveting?
And what do we make of it?
Emergent themes
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Spontaneous.
Ego-less.
Responsive.
Open to possibilities.
Trying to ‘un-learn’ old habits.
Full attention.
Moment to moment.
Consciousness that is not self-centred.
Commonalities: Zen, Punk, Improv
• Attention (Provost)
• ‘Sense of Moment’
(Provost)
• Non-heirarchal (Warner)
Prevost in Monson,
Fischlin, Heble 2004.
Anarchy in the bandroom
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Decentralised.
Rhizomatic.
No dominance or Multi-dominance.
‘Democratic’.
Deleuze and Guittari’s: ‘The Dividual’
“…a collectivity which cannot be reduced to the
individuality of its members or to some leviathan
meta-subject which encompasses them all…”
-Deleuze and Guittari
Features of improvisation…
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Expectations are different.
More interaction with audience than any other form.
Normalisation via feedback.
Anathema to professionalism (but not for ‘Dead-heads’).
More focussed on the ‘now’.
Augmented / additional
▫ Perception
▫ Cognition
▫ Memory
• A way of dealing with the complexity of the modern world?
• Can be manifested in different ways – often invisible to one
another. Eg: John Zorn hiring musicians for personality.
But then again…
• Maybe this is all bullshit.
• According to Deitrich (2008) Creativity is NOT:
▫ Divergent thinking (coming up with more and
more options for a problem).
▫ Right brain
▫ Altered States
▫ De-focussed Attention.
What do you think?
Thank you.
references
Awesome!!
• Awad, E. M. (1985). Systems analysis and design: McGraw-Hill Professional.
• Bailey, D. (1980). Improvisation: its nature and practice in music: Da Capo Pr.
• Borgo, D. (2006). Sync or Swarm: Musical improvisation and the complex
dynamics of group creativity Algebra, Meaning, and Computation (pp. 1-24):
Springer.
• Buchanan, I., & Swiboda, M. (2004). Deleuze and music: Edinburgh University Press.
• Checkland, P. (1999). Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective.
• Dietrich, A. (2007). Who's afraid of a cognitive neuroscience of creativity? Methods, 42(1),
22-27.
• Hargreaves, D., Miell, D., & MacDonald, R. (2012). Musical imaginations.
• Larson, K. (2012). Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the
Inner Life of Artists: Penguin Press.
• Mazzola, G., Park, J., & Thalmann, F. (2011). Musical creativity: Springerverlag Berlin
Heidelberg.
• Monson, I., Fischlin, D., & Heble, A. (2004). The other side of nowhere: Jazz,
improvisation, and communities in dialogue: Wesleyan.
• Sawyer, R. K. (2003). Group creativity: Music, theater, collaboration: Psychology Press.
• Warner, B. (2003). Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock Monster Movies & the Truth About Reality:
Wisdom Publications.
• Warner, B. (2007). Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God,
Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye: New World Library.
Fascinating!!
And… cool additional resources
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Starlings Gibralta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecF0oIgmUfU
Students with lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK7fOx9ySiM
Animal behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_uq2krsnfI
STARLINGS (from 2 minutes) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE
STARLINGS Better! From 1:45 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY
FISH!!!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYl4m0xFcCU
Stanford Prof on ant intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEGV4ZSP22A
3 body problem sonified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_w6JprsXK8
Systems Biology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKhzRpXPvM
Non-linearity demonstration – two metal rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC3K5rnTwnE
And simulated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InBBFF0j040&list=SP0EA72A880AD5776B&index=6
Pendulum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ
Metronomes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqFc4wriBvE (best youtube comment ever: “From Steve Reich to
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Virtual block creatures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBt0imn77Zg
Genetically modified sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I6GAt4abio
Cool little synths: http://vimeo.com/66202532
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Psychedelic Pixel Level Automata: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2G7yhGMaDY
Cool physics guy’s channel – lots of good stuff: https://www.youtube.com/user/khyar?feature=watch
Interactive Universe Simulator: http://universesandbox.com/
Third Reich”. Hilar.)
Oh, and some music…
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Grateful dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsJnBWIyzaA
Miles Davis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFLYz0SdKg
Alvin Lucier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14Pspjok78
Jean Roupech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPbPWju8BsE
Now Now Fest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuV1iJobLMw
Stockhausen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS13kVqzV1I