PERCEPTUOMOTOR ENCODING OF COMPLEX

MOVEMENTS AND THE FEEDFORWARD PROCESS OF JAZZ GUITAR IMPROVISATION

Amy Brandon

Dalhousie University

Nova Scotia, Canada

Full paper, handout and references @ amybrandon.ca

PRESENCE OF INTERVALLIC AND AUDIOMOTORPATTERNS IN JAZZ IMPROVISATION

• Evidence for intervallic patterns (in the work of Charlie Parker): Owens, 1974; Weisberg, 2004

• Models of audiomotor patterning in jazz improvisation: Pressing, 1988; Norgaard, 2014

• Audiomotor connectivity is strong in musicians: Zatorre, Chen, & Penhune, 2007; Palmer, 1997

• Motor recruitment in musicians listening to pieces: Brown et al., 2013; Lahav et al., 2007; Haslinger et al., 2005

• Production effect pronounced in recall of melodies: Brown & Palmer, 2012

• Better recognition of incongruent melodies when physically produced: Mathias, 2016

• Better recognition of incongruence with instrument-specificity: Proverbio, 2014; Drost et al., 2005a

QUALITATIVE EVIDENCE FOR INTERVALLIC / AUDIOMOTOR PATTERNING IN JAZZ GUITAR

IMPROVISATION

• “[Grant] Green is able to make considerable music using this formula and his repeated usage of it [in I'll Remember April] and elsewhere affords him an effective strategy with which to navigate musically in any number of contexts ...” (Scott, 2009: 7)

• “Additionally, [Sonny] Greenwich uses the phrase, with some melodic variation, to organize his improvisation. By articulation or alluding to the theme twenty-two times .. Greenwich employs the formula as the initial 'call' - to which a 'response' occurs later .. “ (Scott, 2003: 68)

• “The analysis [of Pat Metheny’s approach to soloing] has also demonstrated that faster passages can tend to be less purely improvised, the technique often relying more on variations of a set of muscle memories in rhythmically denser passages of music ... “(Dean, 2014: 70)

• “[Charlie] Christian would vary from his own formulas and innovate upon previously assimilated material. An indicator that Christian was still developing his own sound is that most of these exceptions to the formulas are found in later recordings, particularly the ones taken at the jam sessions at Minton’s.” (Finkelman, 1997: 168 as paraphrased in Salmon, 2011: 54)

• “I don’t care if it’s John Coltrane, or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or the greatest or the worst improvisers that ever lived, if you play 200 nights in a row, you are not going to be playing different shit every night. You’re just not.” (Pat Metheny as qtd. in Dean, 2015 p. 70)

PERCEPTUOMOTOR FEEDFORWARD PATTERNS

Some qualitative research indicates that expert guitarists may use a perceptuomotor process to

‘sketch ahead’ their improvisations (Norgaard, 2008).

Visual feedback: Used to guide reaching hand movements or for error correction

Perceptual or visual feedforward: Mental projections of perceptual patterns on the fretboard.

potentially used to 'sketch ahead' or plan future improvisation directions. Illustrated with scale and

chord charts present in a significant number of jazz pedagogical materials such as Pat Martino’s ‘Linear

Expressions’.

FIGURE 1:•

PRESSING MODEL DOWNPLAYS VISUAL FEEDBACK IN EXPERT IMPROVISATION

“... There must also be a developed priority given to auditory monitoring over kinesthetic and especially

visual monitoring. This idea is supported by research on typists (West 1967), which showed that the

dominant visual control used for optimal results in early stages of learning to type gave

way later to reliance on tactile and kinesthetic cues. It also seems likely that sensory

discrimination and motor control functions make increasing use of higher-order space-time

relationships (velocity, acceleration) as skill learning progresses (Marteniuk and Romanow 1983)...”

(Pressing, 1988 p. 9)

This is supported by some visual cognition and motor learning research, but not others:

• Reuter, 2015: Visual attention reduces over time with new visuomotor skill

• Safstrom, 2014: Gaze behaviour tends to look ahead once target reached

• Proteau, 1992: Need for visual feedback increases with expertise in reaching movements

QUALITATIVE EVIDENCE FOR A VISUAL FEEDFORWARD MODEL OF JAZZ GUITAR IMPROVISATION

• Mitch Watkins: “... I try to look at it like say I have a bunch of lights on my fingerboard that light up for... all the eligible notes at a given point in time, and then it is up to me to sort of choose which ones.” (Norgaard, 2008 p. 136)

• Tal Farlow: ‘boxes‘ (Guitar Player, 1975); Joe Negri: ‘chord shapes‘ (Personal Interview); Vic Juris: ‘graphs‘ (Guitar Player, 1981); Howard Roberts: ‘sonic shapes‘ (Guitar Player, 1975) - (McLauglin, 1982 p.7)

• “Since Charlie Christian influenced Barney Kessel, it is easy to see how Barney visualizes his melodic ideas based on certain chord forms ... In measure 23, Barney outlines a Bm9 (B, D, F#, A, C#) arpeggio and then moves this same pattern down to third position so that it is now outlining a Gm9 arpeggio (G, Bb, D, F, A).” (Marquez, 2000 p. 26)

• Sonny Greenwich: “I see the fretboard in diagrams …” (Scott, 2003 p. 65); Vernon Reid: ‘a grid‘ (Demasi, 2012)

• Rez Abbasi: “[. . .] I use targeting in my phrasing; I try to look ahead of where my phrases are going to end.” (Solstad, 2015 p. 96)

• Stein Helge Solstad: “ ... Reflecting on this process from an improvising perspective, I quite often imagine phrases ahead with a defined beginning (including exact visualization on the fretboard) but leave it to harmonic and rhythmic impulses from the other players to shape the actual form of the phrase.” (Solstad, 2015 p. 96)

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR A PERCEPTUOMOTOR FEEDFORWARD PROCESS

Empirical evidence regarding visual dominance in expert guitarists

• Visual dominance in complex, multimodal tasks (Hecht & Reiner, 2009)

• Expert guitarists distinguish chords more easily by sight (Crump, 2012)

• Action-Observation Network influences imitation learning of guitar chords (Buccino and Vogt, 2004)

Perceptual patterns, chunking and schema in chess cognition and expertise research

• Fast pattern recognition a feature of expertise (Ericsson & Staszewski, 1989; Simon and Chase, 1973).

• Related to the model of chunking, schema and templates (Gobet & Simon, 1996; Solstad, 2015)

Influence of pattern recognition and forward search can influence decision making

• Einstellung effect (Bilalic, 2008) and domain-specificity (Bilalic, 2010)

• Musicians are better at multisensory integration (Zimmermann, 2012)

• Musicians tend to be less susceptible to audiovisual illusions (Bidelman, 2016; Proverbio, 2016)

BRAIN AREAS ACTIVE IN EXECUTING FINE MOTOR SEQUENCES

From (Watson, 2006)

Figure 2Figure 1

BRAIN AREAS ACTIVE IN SCORE READING 1

BRAIN AREAS ACTIVE IN SCORE READING 2

Figure 5: Brain areas involved in score-reading (Schön, 2002; Dekker, 2015)

Brain Area Active in score-reading Active in Language-reading Possible Role

Supramarginal Gyrus √ √ Motor intention, particular fingerings

Superior Parietal Cortex √ Active while performing only, neuroplastic, poss. visuo-spatial processing

Interparietal Sulcus √ Sensorimotor integration, fine motor movements

Fusiform Gyrus(Inferior Temporal Gyrus)

√ √ Neuroplastic, rhythm-reading, note recognition

Left Superior Frontal Gyrus √ Working memory

Middle Frontal Gyrus √ √ Working memory

LEARNING A NEW MOTOR SEQUENCE

• Visual and auditory feedback is important for learning new motor sequences (Finney & Palmer, 2003; Furuya, 2014).

• For consolidated motor sequences, the need for auditory and sensory feedback is lessened (Finney & Palmer, 2003)

• Novel movement patterns are first learned quickly, and then consolidated by the brain over a period of 6-8

hours after the activity has concluded (Karni et al. 1995, 1998).

• Subsequent practice sessions offer significant but diminishing returns on improvement (Watson, 2006).

• However, it is during these subsequent repetitions of the motor sequence where new synaptic connections

and cortical map reorganization occurs (Kleim et al., 2004).

MOTOR CONTROL: WHAT VALUE MIGHT PERCEPTUOMOTOR

FEEDFORWARD PATTERNING ADD?

(Lang & Berend, Fingerboard Harmony, 1936 p. 1)

HISTORY OF VISUOMOTOR TRANSFORMATIONS IN JAZZ GUITAR PEDAGOGY

Prior to Fingerboard Harmony (Lang & Berend, 1935) the use of

chord charts and scale patterns were often mocked by guitar

magazines (Noonan, 2004).

“… since the notes on the staff do not follow the placing of the

fingers on the guitar fingerboard as logically as for the right hand of

the piano or harp (high note-high finger) the diagram idea is the

best means of transferring the chords from the printed page to the

instrument.‘

(Berend,1935: 62)

PATTERNS AS A POTENTIALLY LIMITING FACTOR IN JAZZ GUITAR IMPROVISATION

Numerous researchers have noted how jazz guitar undergraduates struggle with improvisation,

with some particularly pointing out that the use of ‘patterns’ in jazz guitar pedagogy may lead to

less creativity or other difficulties with improvisation

• Elmer, 2009; Hale, 2012; Goodrick, 1987; Odegard, 2004; Matone, 2005; Berard, 1998; Balistreri,

1995; Tedesco, 1998, Zarakowski, 2016.

The Einstellung effect describes how both experts and novices will choose the most familiar

solution to a problem, rather than the most effective one in a given situation (Bilalić et. al., 2008).

• “… the form of [an external] representation determines what information can be

perceived, what processes can be activated, and what structures can be discovered from the

specific representation.” (Zhang, 1997: 179).

• “If the current schema acts as a filter for information, then only those aspects that we

can comprehend or are able to act upon will be attended to. Simply stated, one cannot play

the alternative if one has no idea of an alternative way of playing a specific phrase.” (Solstad,

2015: 97).

CONCLUSIONS

Qualitative evidence seems to indicate that expert jazz guitarists use a perceptual or visuomotorfeedforward process to ‘sketch ahead’ and roughly plan their improvisations (Norgaard, 2008), potentially using a similar motor learning and encoding process as sight-reading or music memorization.

These encoded perceptuomotor patterns/motor programming may come to be relied upon in a complex or repetitive musical situations (Dean, 2014; Norgaard et. al., 2016) and are also reflected in the rapid pedagogical shift to from notation to visualization of the fretboard (scale and chordcharts) in early 20th century jazz pedagogy (Lang & Berend, 1936).

Perceptual feedforward patterns, while they may ease the cognitive and biomechanicalcomplexity provided by the fretboard, may also have the potential to limit creative problem-solving through the Einstellung effect (Bilalić et. al., 2008, Luchins, 1942), as well as the limiting influence of external or diagrammatic representations (Zhang, 1997) and schema (Solstad, 2015).

THANK YOU! (AND THANK YOU MILTON!)

Questions?

Contact:

amybrandon.ca

amyGbrandon@gmail.com

References and powerpoint available in PDF @ amybrandon.ca