Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Nov 2:7:1629.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01629. eCollection 2016.

Listeners' and Performers' Shared Understanding of Jazz Improvisations

Affiliations

Listeners' and Performers' Shared Understanding of Jazz Improvisations

Michael F Schober et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

This study explores the extent to which a large set of musically experienced listeners share understanding with a performing saxophone-piano duo, and with each other, of what happened in three improvisations on a jazz standard. In an online survey, 239 participants listened to audio recordings of three improvisations and rated their agreement with 24 specific statements that the performers and a jazz-expert commenting listener had made about them. Listeners endorsed statements that the performers had agreed upon significantly more than they endorsed statements that the performers had disagreed upon, even though the statements gave no indication of performers' levels of agreement. The findings show some support for a more-experienced-listeners-understand-more-like-performers hypothesis: Listeners with more jazz experience and with experience playing the performers' instruments endorsed the performers' statements more than did listeners with less jazz experience and experience on different instruments. The findings also strongly support a listeners-as-outsiders hypothesis: Listeners' ratings of the 24 statements were far more likely to cluster with the commenting listener's ratings than with either performer's. But the pattern was not universal; particular listeners even with similar musical backgrounds could interpret the same improvisations radically differently. The evidence demonstrates that it is possible for performers' interpretations to be shared with very few listeners, and that listeners' interpretations about what happened in a musical performance can be far more different from performers' interpretations than performers or other listeners might assume.

Keywords: audience; improvisation; interpretation; jazz; listener; music cognition; performance; shared understanding.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Screen shot of the first statement to be rated, including additional instructions to listeners.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Example screen shot with layout of embedded audio file, multiple statements to be rated, and the response options (“Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree,” as well as “Don't Understand”) in the online survey.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Average levels of endorsement of statements. All listeners were more likely to endorse statements that performers had agreed about (left half of figure) than statements performers had disagreed about (right half of figure). Listeners who classified themselves as jazz players endorsed statements more (blue bars) than non-jazz-players (green bars). Listeners who reported playing the same instruments as the performers (sax or piano) endorsed statements more (darker bars) than listeners who did not play sax or piano (lighter bars).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Listeners' proximities across their 24 ratings with each other, the performers, and the commenting listener, distinguishing listeners with more and less experience improvising. Raters with more similar ratings (a lower squared Euclidian distance) appear closer together, and raters with more dissimilar ratings (a higher squared Euclidian distance) appear farther apart. This force-directed graph, representing the proximity matrix of each rater's squared Euclidian distance (across their 24 ratings) from every other rater's, was created using the ForceAtlas2 algorithm in Gephi 8.2, with setting of an approximate repulsion force of 1.2, a gravity force of 1.0, and a scaling of 2.0 (see Jacomy et al., 2014).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Listeners' proximities across their 24 ratings with each other, the performers, and the commenting listener, distinguishing listeners by the instruments they reported playing. Raters with more similar ratings (a lower squared Euclidian distance) appear closer together, and raters with more dissimilar ratings (a higher squared Euclidian distance) appear farther apart. This force-directed graph, representing the proximity matrix of each rater's squared Euclidian distance (across their 24 ratings) from every other rater's, was created using the ForceAtlas2 algorithm in Gephi 8.2, with setting of an approximate repulsion force of 1.2, a gravity force of 1.0, and a scaling of 2.0 (see Jacomy et al., 2014).

References

    1. Antonietti A., Cocomazzi D., Iannello P. (2009). Looking at the audience improves music appreciation. J. Nonverbal Behav. 33, 89–106. 10.1007/s10919-008-0062-x - DOI
    1. Bachrach A., Fontbonne Y., Joufflineau C., Ulloa J. L. (2015). Audience entrainment during live contemporary dance performance: physiological and cognitive measures. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 9:179. 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00179 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Barker M. (2013). ‘Live at a cinema near you’: how audiences respond to digital streaming of the arts, in The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts, eds Radbourne J., Glow H., Johanson K. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; ), 15–34.
    1. Bharucha J., Curtis M., Paroo K. (2011). Musical communication as alignment of brain states, in Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, eds Rebuschat P., Rohmeier M., Hawkins J. A., Cross I. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; ), 139–155. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553426.003.0016 - DOI
    1. Bishop L., Goebl W. (2015). When they listen and when they watch: pianists' use of nonverbal audio and visual cues during duet performance. Music. Sci. 19, 84–110. 10.1177/1029864915570355 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources