While research on auditory attention in complex acoustical environment is a thriving field, experimental studies thus far have typically treated participants as passive listeners. The present study—which combined real-time covert loudness manipulations and online probe detection—investigates for the first time to our knowledge, the effects of acoustic salience on auditory attention during live interactions, using musical improvisation as an experimental paradigm. We found that musicians were more likely to pay attention to a given co-performer when this performer was made sounding louder or softer; that such salient effect was not owing to the local variations introduced by our manipulations but rather likely to be driven by the more long-term context; and that improvisers tended to be more strongly and more stably coupled when a musician was made more salient. Our results thus demonstrate that a meaningful change of the acoustical context not only captured attention but also impacted the ongoing musical interaction itself, highlighting the tight relationship between attentional selection and interaction in such social scenarios and opening novel perspectives to address whether similar processes are at play in human linguistic interactions.

This paper explores the hypothesis that similar structural notions can arise in different creative contexts, such as free improvisation and contemporary composition. Participants segmented a recorded improvisation into sequences based on personal criteria. Two groups were given different contexts: one group was informed the piece was a free improvisation, while the other was told it was a contemporary composition. Each participant analyzed one of 10 recordings. We aligned the segmentations by looking for overlaps within a specific time frame, Δt, considering segments simultaneous if they occurred within [t – Δt; t + Δt] of each other. Results indicated a high degree of similarity in perceived structure: 64% of segments overlapped within a 5-second frame, and 71% within 10 seconds. Additionally, the study found variations in the total number of segments and a correlation between sequence duration and the number of instruments used in the piece. These findings suggest that despite different contexts, there is a comparable perception of structural elements in musical pieces.

Nosso objeto de análise neste artigo é o conjunto de peças insígnia, escafandro, sátira e locus, criadas pelo autor. Estas são consideradas como experimentos em comprovisação, devido às características de seus processos criativos. Comprovisação, como um termo recente na literatura, não há até o momento um consenso; por isto, reunimos aqui possíveis antecedentes, as noções sobre e práticas que buscam na comprovisação sua caracterização. Distinguimos duas vertentes teóricas sobre o assunto, e realizamos considerações próprias almejando uma compreensão do termo a partir de uma interligação os fluxos de interpretação e improvisação – estes vinculados a noções de processos generativos da performance e da compreensão de Falleiros (2012) sobre o pacto. Por meio de ferramentas tradicionais de análise, e da perspectiva notacional de Bhagwati (2013), acreditamos que a ressignificação dos gestos improvisados existentes nas peças analisadas aponta para a compreensão destas como experimentos em comprovisação.

In this paper, we aim to reproduce and expand on some of the empirical experiments that have been used to address the aesthetics of listening to improvised music. We focus on a piece of music that we consider to be a comprovisation, a term used for music that is a blend of composition and improvisation. The responses offered by the participants in our experiment were somewhat ambiguous, as there was no clear consensus in regard to the suggested musical form or the quality of judgments about the compositional and improvisational aspects of the piece. The piece used for the empirical experiment was based on a free improvisation of two Brazilian musicians: Vinicius Dorin on soprano saxophone and Nenê on drums. The music was further reorganized (by means of digital audio edition) and orchestrated by American composer John Rapson. The final phonogram represents an interpretation of the composer’s improvisation, but it still reflects the improvisational characteristics of the primary material. Our method is based on Canonne’s (2018) empirical experiments, which departs from an analysis based on the grounded theory approach of multiple comparison. Our method is also based on the vision of the contextual information’s influence on subjective evaluations (Anglada-Tort, 2018). We separated the participants into musicians and non-musicians, and then divided them into three groups, giving each group a different informational context. Despite using a small sample of participants and a qualitative analysis, we believe that the results show how ambiguity can exist among listeners who are exposed to music without any context information. However, because this research is a first step, we cannot generalize the results. In the future, we believe that this kind of experiment could be expanded to confirm our primary data.

Este artigo tem como objetivo versar sobre nocoes de comprovisacao e propor uma nova abordagem para complementarmos sua compreensao. O termo, utilizado recentemente na literatura, nao possui um consenso conceitual. Iremos, portanto, abordar as vertentes teoricas e as definicoes existentes em autores como Hannan (2006), Dudas (2010), Mailman (2013) e Bhagwati (2011), assim como exemplos praticos de obras comprovisadas, porem, com um vies critico, a partir de uma analise sobre os fluxos da interpretacao e da improvisacao. Consideramos a comprovisacao como pratica inserida no que Ranciere (2005) considera como regime estetico das artes, e que tem como base uma equiparacao de processos composicionais e improvisatorios e uma possivel autonomia do interprete. Para nossa abordagem, recorreremos ao conceito de recursividade, este derivado da linguistica, por meio da compreensao da improvisacao como um processo autorreferente, e das diferentes operacoes de recursao existentes no processo composicional e improvisatorio.