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Dr Shock MD PhD
Improvisation is the main feature of Jazz that distinguishes it from other forms of music making. Improvisation is the spontaneous musical performance within a relevant musical context. It consists of novel melodic, harmonic and rhythmic musical elements. This unique feature of jazz offers the opportunity for neurobiological research or even creativity. What they did was do a functional MRI brain scan on 6 highly skilled professional jazz musicians.
These jazz musicians had to play a simple musical tune and an improvisation on this tune with the restriction to the use of C major scale quarter notes within the same octave of the simple tune. Next they had to play a memorized original jazz composition with the accompagnement of a pre-recorded jazz quartet followed by an improvisation of the memorized composition. In order to compare brain activity during these two conditions. Everything was recorded, the music and finger/hand movements. The participants used a keyboard in the fMRI without iron.
Spontaneous improvisation was in each case associated with a highly congruous pattern of activations and deactivations in prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor and limbic regions of the brain. In addition, the majority of these regions showed functionally reciprocal patterns of activity. That is, activations during improvisation were matched by deactivations during the control tasks, and vice versa, when each condition was compared to the resting baseline.
