Cog Sci Colloquium: Clement Canonne (CNRS, Paris)

Title: The cognition of collective improvisation

Abstract: Most studies in the field of music cognition treat music as an abstract sonic structure, a “sound 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 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 collectively produced affect our listening experience.