Time: 4:00–6:00pm

Location: Fayerweather Room 513 on Columbia’s Morningside Campus

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Clément Canonne (IRCAM) to speak to our group.

Recommended reading:

Moran, Nikki, et al. “Perception of ‘Back-Channeling’ Nonverbal Feedback in Musical Duo Improvisation.” PloS one 10.6 (2015): e0130070.

Aucouturier, Jean-Julien, and Clément Canonne. “Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions.” Cognition 161 (2017): 94-108.

The Cognition of Collective Improvisation

Most studies in the field of music cognition treat music as an abstract sonic structure, a “sonic text” that is received, analyzed for syntax and form, and eventually decoded for content and expression. However, music is also something that people do, and often something that people do together, a creative activity whose meaning is generated in real-time as a result of the interactions between a series of agents. This collective and interactive dimension of music-making is perhaps most obvious in improvised music, such as jazz or free jazz. In this talk, I will thus present several studies centered on collective free improvisation in order to better understand: how musicians manage to coordinate their actions and create music together when common knowledge between them is minimal; and how attending to music as interactively produced affects our listening experience.