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, ...

Music composition and improvisation represent two intertwined yet distinct expressions of creative musical practice. Whereas composition often involves the deliberate crafting of musical structures ...

An international research team investigated the brains of 16 jazz pianists while they played a piece from memory, improvised based on the melody, and freely improvised based on the chord changes. The ...

Recent findings in neuroscience provide new evidence that musical creativity is not a static trait but a dynamic process involving the rapid reconfiguration of brain networks. By monitoring the brain ...

Skilled improvisers were better than musicians with limited improvisational experience at distinguishing between chords that can be used interchangeably in a piece of music and those that cannot, a ...