Archives

Synchronization in a network of violin players may shed light on how human networks function in society, researchers report.

Human networking involves every field and includes small groups of people to large, coordinated systems working together toward a goal, be it traffic management in an urban area, economic systems, or epidemic control.

The research team devised an experiment involving 16 violinists with electric violins connected to a computer system. Each of the violinists had sound-canceling headphones, hearing only the sound received from the computer.

All violinists played a simple repeating musical phrase and tried to synchronize with other violinists according to what they heard in their headphones.

the violinists sit on and just off a large stage, each with a barrier between the players sitting next to them — Sixteen violinists participating in the networking experiment in which they are connected to a computer system hearing only the sound received from the computer. (Credit: Chen Damari)

“Research on network links or coupling has focused predominantly on all-to-do coupling, whereas current social networks and human interactions are often based on complex coupling configurations,” according to the researchers.

“This study of synchronization between violin players in complex networks with full control over network connectivity, coupling strength, and delay, revealed that players can tune their playing period and delete connections by ignoring frustrating signals to find a stable solution. These controlled and new degrees of freedom enable new strategies and yield better solutions potentially applicable for other human networking models.”

“Society in its complexity is recognizing how human networks affect a broad range of crucial issues, including economic inequality, stock market crashes, political polarization, and the spread of disease,” says Daniel Weymouth, an associate professor of composition and theory in the music department at Stony Brook University.

“We believe there are a lot of important, real-world applications to the results of this experiment and ongoing work.”

The research appears in Nature Communications.

Additional researchers from Stony Brook and Bar-llan and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Source: Stony Brook University

Singer-songwriter robot is heading out on tour

What happens to the brain when jazz musicians improvise?

Interactive map shows the 13 emotions music makes us feel

Researchers are investigating what happens inside jazz musicians’ brains as they improvise music.

Although musical improvisation—composing new passages on the spot—is not unique to jazz, it’s perhaps the genre’s most defining element. While improvised jazz solos are spontaneous, there are rules, says Martin Norgaard, associate professor of music education at Georgia State University.

“In tonal jazz, improvisation is not ‘free,'” he says. “It’s always tied to the chord structure that the melody is based on.”

In other words, improvisation is an incredibly complex form of creative expression, yet great jazz improvisers like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane make it seem effortless.

“As a musician, you feel that there’s something different about the way your brain is working when you improvise,” says Norgaard, a violinist who came to the US in 1985 to study jazz. “You’re tapping all your stored knowledge and adapting it to a chord structure in real time.”

Getting into the flow of music

While earning his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, Norgaard began studying the effects of musical improvisation: interviewing jazz artists and students about their thoughts during the process of improvisation, analyzing the solos of Charlie Parker for patterns, and asking musicians to perform a secondary task while improvising to see how it affects their performances.

Last spring, he teamed up with Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor of physics and astronomy, and asked advanced jazz musicians to sing pre-learned and improvised music while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, a test that measures activity in the brain.

In the study, published in Brain Connectivity, the researchers found decreased brain connectivity during improvisation. Norgaard says the finding isn’t as surprising as you might think.

“This idea of ‘flow‘—where you’re completely immersed in an activity—has been linked to deactivation of some brain areas,” says Norgaard. “It may be that performing improvisation engages a smaller, more focused brain network, while other parts of the brain go quiet.”

Jazz improvisation and flexible thinking

In his most recent study, published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, Norgaard examines the “far transfer effect” of improvisation—how learning to invent music in the moment affects other cognitive abilities.

“For nearly three decades, scientists have explored the idea that learning to play an instrument is linked to academic achievement,” says Norgaard. “Yet at the same time, there are many types of music learning. Does the kid who learns by ear get the same benefits as the kid who learns notation or the kid who learns to improvise?”

The researchers started by conducting a pre-test, in which they asked two sets of middle school kids to each perform two tasks: one that tests cognitive flexibility, or the brain’s ability to task-switch, and another that tests inhibitory control, or the brain’s ability to focus on relevant information and block out irrelevant information. The middle-schoolers played instruments, but only some studied jazz through the Georgia State Rialto Jazz for Kids program. They found that the jazz students drastically outperformed their concert band peers.

“Still, we didn’t know: are kids with high levels of cognitive flexibility simply drawn to jazz, or is it the improvisation that produces the effect,” says Norgaard.

To follow up, he and his collaborators asked the school’s band director to divide his entire concert band—155 7th and 8th graders—into two groups. Each group learned about jazz, but only half learned improvisation. Then each group was given the same two brain tests. The result: improvisation training led to a significant improvement in cognitive flexibility.

“Their scores started looking like the scores of the kids who had studied jazz from the pre-test,” says Norgaard.

The improvements were only apparent in the 8th graders; 7th-grade students instead saw a small improvement in inhibitory control.

“It’s hard to say what’s driving the difference in effect. Maybe it’s the age of the kids or maybe it’s the number of years spent playing an instrument,” says Norgaard. “In the future, we need to look into whether improvisation has different cognitive effects depending on a student’s age or experience.”

Source: Georgia State University