The Improvising Brain

Concert: April 7, 2013, 8:00pm at Kopleff Recital Hall
Keynote Address: April 8, 2013, 11:00am at Kopleff Recital Hall
Symposium:  April 7-8, 2013 at the Loudermilk Center

Reserve seats for the concert by clicking here
Reserve seats for the keynote address by clicking here

The Improvising Brain is a symposium and concert event that will bring together researchers and musicians to explore music, improvisation, and related brain processes. 

The concert event, featuring jazz violinist Christian Howes accompanied by GSU jazz faculty members Kevin Bales (piano), Robert Dickson (bass), and Justin Varnes (drums), will explore cognitive and interactive processes in improvisation. During the second half of the concert, a panel will be asking performers to comment on musical choices while listening to and looking at notation from a just-completed performance. This interview section, conducted by Robert Zatorre, Martin Norgaard, and others, will follow a regular performance set and intermission. 

The keynote address will be delivered by Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Dr. Zatorre will be giving a talk entitled "When the Brain Plays Music: Perception, Production, and Emotion."

The symposium will feature peer-reviewed paper presentations on the topic of music, cognition, and improvisation. Though several recent conferences and symposia have explored the neural underpinnings of music, none have specifically focused on improvisation. All live music has an element of improvisation, whether at the level of interpretation or the selection of pitches and rhythms. Even a pre-learned classical concerto will necessarily sound slightly different from one performance to the other as exact motor movements cannot be replicated. In some musics, such as jazz, bluegrass, and Indian classical music, improvisation on the pitch and rhythm level is an intricate part of the tradition. One can argue that all music stems from an improvisational tradition as music performance preceded notation and it is unlikely that music in prehistoric times were pre-learned and performed without variations.

The symposium will explore how music and decision making involved in improvisation relate to brain processes. Are note choices during improvisation and word choices during speech controlled by similar decision making processes? Is it the sound or the motor movements that drive the choices? How do the environment and the underlying musical structure affect these decisions? The symposium will explore these questions and others related to music perception, production, and their underlying cognitive processes.

For registration and more information about the symposium, please visit the Improvising Brain website. Registration is FREE for GSU faculty and students.