Professor studies how jazz improvisation affects the brain | Neuroscience - Medical Xpress

Jazz artist Louis Armstrong once said, "never play a thing the same way twice." according to Jennifer Rainey Marquez, Communications director. Content strategist. Journalist.

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Although musical improvisation—composing new passages on the spot—is not unique to jazz, it's perhaps the genre's most defining element. While improvised jazz solos are spontaneous, there are rules, says Martin Norgaard, associate professor of music education. 

"In tonal jazz, improvisation is not 'free,'" he says. "It's always tied to the chord structure that the melody is based on."
In other words, improvisation is an incredibly complex form of creative expression, yet great jazz improvisers like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or John Coltrane make it seem effortless. Which makes you wonder: what's happening inside jazz players' brains as they simultaneously compose and play music?...

While earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, Norgaard began studying the effects of musical improvisation: interviewing jazz artists and students about their thoughts during the process of improvisation, analyzing the solos of Charlie Parker for patterns and asking musicians to perform a secondary task while improvising to see how it affects their performances.

Last spring, he teamed up with Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor of physics and astronomy, and asked advanced jazz musicians to sing prelearned and improvised music while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, a test that measures activity in the brain.
In the study, published in Brain Connectivity, the researchers found decreased brain connectivity during improvisation. Norgaard says the finding isn't as surprising as you might think.
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Source: Medical Xpress