On 12/30/25 22:59, Joel Roth wrote: No, sorry. Although my piano instructor supplemented his income by accompanying ballet practices and classes at the Sacramento Ballet, where the instructor/director would tell him the mood he wanted, and my instructor would improvise music around that. My instructor also taught me something about music history. During the so-called Classical Period, now famous for musicians playing well-known pieces from printed music, every musician was expected to improvise. On demand. Someone might stand up in the audience and sing or whistle a melody line. And the musician was expected to improvise a piece (such as two-, three- or four-part counterpoint!) using it. We worked quite a bit on pursuing that skill; I used to be able to improvise 2 and 3 part inventions like that. Now only down to 2 part, unfortunately. Yes. Being aware of different ways of playing things, styles. For keyboard players, changing voicing for example. Adding instruments a band might not have otherwise. Pesky directors! 😉 Sounds dull to me. Yes! -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π."

On 1/1/26 01:43, Bengt Gördén wrote: Thanks, thanks for the link to the full study. Well, music *is* a form of language, so musicians improvising together are speaking a common language. I suspect the study in this thread only covered individual musicians because using fMRI on groups of people is real tough! But it might be interesting to do the fMRI study with each member of a group of jazz musicians improvising. That might pick up synchronizations across the different brains involved. For instance, if one musician puts a phrase or melody line out there, how do the others receive, react, and respond to it - before they actually play their musical response? Or maybe within every musician there are actually multiple "musicians", like one mode focused on rhythm, another on melody, another on expressiveness, another integrating it all and taking into account external sources such as other musicians also improvising? Yes, I do somewhat agree with the multimind idea of consciousness. The brain is extremely complex, with multiple layers of networks, powered by neurons that make and break connections. So I wouldn't be surprised if multiple minds actually underlay our top-level consciousness. I also wouldn't be surprised if music taps into those multiple layers of mind just as it taps into multiple brain networks to do it's work. Ideas? -- David W. Jones gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π."