Clément Canonne

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social relations between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, disdainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole.

Play together, think alike: Shared mental models in expert music improvisers

When musicians improvise together, they tend to agree beforehand on a common structure (e.g. a jazz standard) which helps them coordinate. However, in the particular case of collective free improvisation (CFI), musicians deliberately avoid having such a referent. How, then, can they coordinate? We propose that CFI musicians who have experience playing together come to share higher-level knowledge, which is not piece-specific but rather task-specific: an implicit mental model of what it is to improvise freely. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 19 expert improvisers from the Parisian CFI community, who had various degrees of experience playing with one another. Drawing from the methodology of team cognition, we used a card-sorting procedure on a set of 25 short improvised sound sequences to elicit and represent each participant’s mental model of the CFI task. We then evaluated the similarity between the participants’ models, and used the measure in a nearest neighbour classification algorithm to retrieve clusters of participants who were known to play together. As hypothesized, we found that the degree of similarity in participants’ mental models predicted their degree of musical familiarity with better-than-random accuracy: musicians who played together tended to ‘think’ about improvised music in the same way.

Individual Decisions and Perceived Form in Collective Free Improvisation

This paper proposes a first attempt to study quantitatively Collective Free Improvisation (CFI). We report an experiment designed to study the relationship between the improvisers’ individual high-level decisions and the improvisation’s form perceived by external auditors. We recorded 16 trios in which the improvisers used a MIDI-pedal to indicate in real-time a significant change in their own musical production. Expert listeners were later asked to segment each improvisation so that we obtained their perception of the structure. By analysing the correlations between musicians’ individual decisions and listeners’ segmentation points, we discuss how the improvisation’s form emerges from the improvisers’ individual behaviours. While the overall structure depends on individual contributions and decisions which can be well-identified, it is never fully determined by them.