Perspectives on Musical Improvisation II - Oxford Pras & Cance

Delving into special moments of free improvisation

Abstract
This paper investigates the discrepancy between musicians’ subjective experience when they
are improvising and their opinion on the musical result when they are listening back to their
performance. We identified the importance of this discrepancy when we interviewed twelve
New-York-based musicians coming from diverse cultural backgrounds and generations, all
having an international career with more than fifteen years of professional experience in free
improvisation. To further investigate the contrast between musicians’ memory about their
performance experience and their feedback about the musical result, we videotaped three
concerts and three studio sessions and then asked these musicians to watch, listen and
comment the video.
In our paper we will present the different improvisation processes that we identified through
the analysis of our interviews, with an emphasis on the similarities and disparities among the
interviewees’ artistic approaches. We will describe the procedure of our feedback sessions
that we adapted according to each ensemble or soloist and we will focus on i) special
moments for which the musicians reported intense feelings when they were performing and
ii) musical moments that were selected when listening back to the improvisations. The
descriptions of these moments will be illustrated by video excerpts of the concerts.
This paper contributes to designing new methods for analysis of improvisational practices by
triangulating semi-directed interviews conducted within a phenomenological approach
(Vermersch, 2009), observations in concerts, and self-confrontational interview methods in
feedback sessions (Theureau, 2003). Our research takes place in the recent field of Tracking
Creative Processes in Music (Donin & Theureau, 2007) that gives greater importance to the
practitioners’ voice rather than the analysis of musical elements from recording transcriptions.
By adapting the procedure of the feedback sessions to the specificities of each ensemble, we
address the complexity of investigating this social practice based on creativity and
idiosyncrasy.
Bibliography
Donin, N., & Theureau, J. (2007). Theoretical and methodological issues related to long term
creative cognition: the case of musical composition. Cognition, Technology & Work, 9(4),
233-251.
Theureau, J. (2003). Course-of-action analysis and course-of-action centered design.
Handbook of cognitive task design, 55-81.
Vermersch, P. (2009). Describing the Practice of Introspection. Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 16(10-1), 20‑57.
Affiliations
Amandine Pras
The Centre for Interdisciplinary for Research Media and Technology (CIRMMT), Montreal,
Qc, Canada
Research funded by a post doctorate fellowship of the Fonds Quebecois de la Recherche
Société et Culture (FQRSC)
Caroline Cance
Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL), UMR 7270 - CNRS & Université d’Orléans,
France
Perspectives on Musical Improvisation II - Oxford Pras & Cance  

Bios
Amandine Pras conducts postdoctoral research on free improvisation at The New School for
Social Research and she teaches recording techniques at the Steinhardt School of New York
University. Her research interests encompass the analysis of creative processes, media arts,
and audio quality evaluation. Amandine graduated from the Music and Sound Recording
program of Paris Conservatory (2006) and she completed her PhD at McGill University
(2012) investigating the best practices in the production of musical recordings in the digital
era. Alongside her academic activities, she works as a record producer for a great variety of
contemporary and experimental creations, often involving new technology.
Caroline Cance is an assistant professor in Linguistics focusing on the relationship between
language, perception and cognition. She works at the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique
(Orléans University, http://www.lll.cnrs.fr/). After a master degree in Cognitive Science, she
completed a PhD in Linguistics, researching discourses, representations and experiences of
colors (2008). She then gradually shifted to studying human experience of sonic and musical
phenomena. In her postdoctoral research at the Laboratoire d’Acoustique Musicale (UPMC,
Paris), she observed and analyzed the novel practices generated by new digital musical
devices (2009). She has collaborated with Amandine Pras since a research residency at
CIRMMT (Montréal, 2011).