“Quantifying JI” Debate.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of music their behaviors are not fully prescribed in advance. Nonetheless their actions become so tightly coordinated and their decisions so seamlessly intertwined that the musicians behave as a single synergistic unit rather than a collection of individuals. A fundamental aspect of such musical improvisation is the bodily movement coordination that occurs among the performing musicians, with the embodied interaction of musicians both supporting and constraining musical creativity. Here we consider the ability of pairs of piano players to improvise, to spontaneously coordinate their actions with co­performers. We demonstrate the ability of the time­evolving patterns of inter­musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of non­ linear time series analyses to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. Cross wavelet spectral analysis is applied to the musical movements of pairs of improvising pianists, a method that isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination across a range of nested time­scales. Additionally, cross­recurrence quantification analysis is applied to the series of notes produced by each musician to assess when and how often they visit the same musical states throughout the improvisation. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Some types of music therapy, such as Nordoff Robbins, involve improvisation by the client and therapist andthe relationship between the participants’ music making is prioritised. Some children with a diagnosis ofautism who attend these kinds of music therapy sessions often have difficulties speaking and can bereferred for a range of reasons (including difficulties in communication). What does improvisation look like inthis context? Does it differ between sessions and if so how? Can charting what improvisation in the sessionslooks like help assess changes in the client and/or the relationship between the participants? Studies ofmusic therapy sessions often analyse short moments. This focus makes it difficult to understand the contextof results and assess what the moments are representative of. In this study of case examples we annotate accordingto an annotation protocol videosof complete music therapysessions of 4 clienttherapistpairs. Each pair has two videos: one early and one late in the series ofsessions. Characteristics annotated include: where players are facing, whether they are making sounds, andthe sounds’ pulse characteristics. A range of patterns for each of these parameters was identified fordifferent clienttherapistpairs. This exploration of the types of possible patterns and relationships in musictherapy sessions helps to characterise, at a general level, what happens in sessions; provide a context formoments that might be analysed in more detail; and identify what differs between players and their sharedcharacteristics both across pairs and between pairs of sessions.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Research on joint improvisation has shown that expert improvisers, as well as neurotypical individuals, canjointly create novel complex motion, synchronized to less than 180ms (Noy et al., 2011; Hart et al., 2014;Golland et al., 2015; FeiningerSchaalet al., in review). Presumably, this ability relies on these individuals’motor skills and social skills – yet little is known about the preconditions and correlates of successful jointimprovisation. Here, we employ the Mirror Game paradigm (Noy et al., 2011) with a population of adults withAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD is defined by a deficit in social and communication skills and atendency for routinized behaviors yet recent research has been pointing to a possibly more primary difficultywith sensorymotorsynchronization in ASD (Gowen & Hamilton, 2013), which may in turn impedeindividuals’ ability to synchronize with others, leading to reduced social and communicative skills (Marsh etal. 2013; de Jaegher, 2013). 40 individuals with autism, and 40 agegenderandIQmatchedTypicallyDeveloping (TD) control participants played the Mirror Game against the same expert improviser. The studyaims to determine: (a) whether individuals with ASD have a reduced capacity for sensorymotorsynchronization compared to TD participants; and (b) whether the ability of both TD and ASD participants tosynchronize their motions with another player is related to basic motor skills (i.e., motor coordination,proprioception and imitation) on the one hand, and participants’ everyday social skills (conversationalrapport, empathy and autism symptom severity) on the other.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Experiments on joint action have given us insights into the mechanisms that allow people to coordinate theiractions with each other, be it making music, dancing, or cooking a dish together. One key finding is thatpeople engage in predictions about their interaction partner’s actions. For example, when someone is aboutto hand over a candle to us, we anticipate the start and the timing of her action. A further key finding is thatpeople systematically modulatetheir actions in ways that make it easier for their interaction partners to predict them. For example, if youdon’t know whether I am about to go left or right, I may veer further to the left to signal where I am going.While these mechanisms work well for joint actionswhere the goals and the tasks that need to be performed are specified in advance, less is known about therole they play in joint improvisation where predicting others’ actions can seem impossible or detrimental. Iwill discuss the benefits and limits of action prediction in joint improvisation.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

To what extent do collaborating improvisers understand what they are doing in the same way as each other?And to what extent do their listeners understand the improvisation in the same way as the performers? Thistalk reviews evidence from two case studies (with Neta Spiro and Amandine Pras) of pianosaxophoneduos, one improvising three versions of a jazz standard (“It Could Happen to You”) and one carrying out anextended free jazz improvisation. In both studies, immediately afterwards the performers were separatelyinterviewed, from memory and prompted by audiorecordings, about their detailed characterizations of theperformances. Outside listeners (expert musicians in the same genres) were also interviewed for theircharacterizations. Later, the performers and outside listeners rated the extent to which they endorsedanonymized versions of statements by all participants, based on close relistening to the recordings. 239internet listeners also rated their levels of endorsement of the jazz standard characterizations. In both cases,performers endorsed statements they themselves had generated most often, but they endorsed statementsby an outside listener more than their performing partner’s statements. Overall levels of agreement amongthe performers were greater than chance but quite low. Among the 239 listeners to the jazz standardimprovisations, only a very small number agreed with the performers’ characterizations at a level greaterthan chance. The implication is that fully shared understanding of what happened is not essential forsuccessful joint improvisation, and that performers’ interpretations are not necessarily privileged relative toan outsider’s.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Clear empirical distinctions can be drawn between joint improvisation and choreography in dance by exploring the rhythmical coordination of dancers and audience members in a partner dance performance. Novice dancers typically learn footwork patterns or ’basics’ that help them move in time to music together. Experts’ familiarity with basics, as well as conventional variations and set­piece moves form a set of compositional structures that can be linked together to fit complimentary rhythmical patterns in music on the fly. In a ’social dance’ performance such as the Lindy hop, (an African American vernacular jazz dance from which the data for this study is drawn), dancers link together basics with set­piece moves along with moments of joint improvisation. These improvised movements are literally extemporaneous ­ they move out of the temporal regularities of mutually learned patterns and rely on other kinds of interactional resources and methods to achieve coordination. This paper analyses rhythmical coordination between dancers and audience members clapping along to a Lindy hop performance in a naturalistic setting using data drawn from a Youtube video. This empirical starting point enables a tractable analysis of the haptic, visual, and semantic structures and processes used for coordinating extemporaneous dance movements. Audience members’ rhythmical responses to these processes also provides insight into long­standing problems of measurement and meaning in empirical aesthetics. Music and dance psychology tend to emphasise psychophysical measures and post­hoc report as proxies for aesthetic response. This paper proposes new ways to use the observable patterns of rhythmical coordination to explore joint improvisation as part of an interactional sense­making practice
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Carrying the Feeling explores autistic Lucy Blackman’s use of “carrying” as an expressive force in herwriting. Continuing to delve into what I have called autistic perception theforce of perception that doesn’tyet parse out the environment but attends to the emergent qualities of an environmentality in act inthispaper I explore how else we might think conceptssuch as volition, intentionality and agency. Of particular interest here is the concept of facilitation, and theimprovisatory nature of what I call a “facilitation of facilitation.” If carrying is a force that already composeswith language, perhaps there is a productive way to consider an environmentally propulsive concept ofagencement as operator in experience rather than the ubiquitous firstpersonaccount of agency?Challenging what I call “neurotypicality as first identity politics,” I propose to open up a discussion of whereelse a conversation of relation might begin.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

"I have been a practitioner of soloandjointimprovisationin music and dance for a while. And I have alwayswondered what the main differences were between the two. What I am particularly interested in are the typeof experiences that allow me to cognitively function in a different way, that is, that allow me to explore new(cognitive) territories. In particular, there is always a moment, in an improvisation, be it solo or joint, when Iam in the « zone », that is, in a type of trance where my conscious mind is not in control anymore, or at leastseems not to be in control anymore. And my experience is that I reach that state faster in joint improvisationthan in solo improvisation. In this presentation that will be more in the form of a conversation, I would like totry to describe the experiences I have been through as an improviser from a phenomenologicalpointofview,and emphasize the differences between soloandjointimprovisation.I will formulate somehypotheses on brain remapping in both situations, soloandjointimprovisations,hypotheses that rely fornow only on my own phenomenological experiences and my own interpretation of them. I will also describehow I believe that soloandjointimprovisationsprovide an excellent framework to illustrate the concept ofenaction proposed by Francisco Varela, and how this concept is activated slightly differently in both cases."
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation

Improvising music toghether involves coping in realtimewith unprecedented patterns of behavior of another. The goal is to achieve and share a meaningful coperformance,and this is done by interacting.Therefore, processes underlying improvisation cannot be fully grasped by musical analysis only. Behavioralpatterns and collective dynamics that underlie joint improvisation encourage the scientific study of thecoperformanceitself. This is important to understand how improvisers can coordinate their behavior together in a meaningful fashion. However, improvising is first and foremost a practice that requires learning,experience and expertise. Objective measurements aren’t sufficient : integrating the phenomenologicalpoint of view of the improviser is also necessary. For this reason, we work as a dyad of researchers: acognitive scientist, and a professor of pedagogy who makes use of improvisation to foster learning. We thentrack interactive processes underlying joint improvisation during their very learning by novices and with theguidance of an expert. In this talk, we describe our pedagogical method of interactive improvisation (theKaddouch pedagogy) and its underlying system of thought. We present our system of qualitative analyses ofmusical interactionsand frame our observations during lessons in a dynamical, enactive framework. Then, we show how wecapture interaction processes by quantitative and dynamical analysis. More specifically, we are currentlyinterested in the coordination of tempo fluctuations during performance. On the basis of our concepts,observations and results, we discuss the role of the process of interaction as a source of coordinationbetween improvisers’ behavior.
Mot(s) clés libre(s) : interaction linguistique, improvisation