Skilled Improvisers Detect Easy-to-Substitute Chords Faster than Non-improvisers, Says Study

John Coltrane and Jerry Garcia became improvising legends for their ability to mix musical elements on the fly. How the brain accomplishes such feats of creativity under pressure remains a mystery, though practice is increasingly thought to play a pivotal role.

Now, in a new study in the journal Psychology of Music, Columbia University researchers show that skilled improvisers are better than musicians with limited improvisational experience at distinguishing between chords that can be used interchangeably in a piece of music and chords that cannot. Further, when the improvisers recognized a chord unsuitable for substitution, their brains showed a pattern of electrical activity distinct from non-improvising musicians.

“It turns out that the degree to which we can predict how musicians respond to different types of musical substitution has nothing to do with how much they practice, but the waythey practice,” said the study’s senior author, Paul Sajda, a biomedical engineer at Columbia Engineering and a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “Improvisational practice seems to reinforce how the brain represents different types of musical structures.”

The researchers asked 40 musicians to listen to a series of chord progressions randomly interspersed with two types of chord variations: one from the same functional class (say, a similar chord with its notes inverted), and one from outside the class (say, a major chord juxtaposed against a minor chord). The improvisers, most of them trained in jazz, identified the oddball chords unsuitable for substitution faster and more accurately than the mostly classically-trained musicians with limited improvisational practice. How well they performed, the study found, was largely predicted by their level of improvisation experience.

Improvisation is hardly confined to music—it underlies much of daily life. Faced with a delayed train, you might decide to walk or take the bus; a missing ingredient, the closest alternative. With a flexible mindset, a creative solution is often at hand. With music, as with cooking, the trick is knowing the rules of substitution, says the study’s lead author, Andrew Goldman, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia.