Improvisation is one of the most complex forms of creative behavior. The improvising musician faces the unique challenge of managing several simultaneous processes in real-time – generating and evaluating melodic and rhythmic sequences, coordinating performance with other musicians in an ensemble, and executing elaborate fine-motor movements – all with the overall goal of creating esthetically appealing music. (Beaty, 2015)
A JAZZ MUSICIAN’S STRESS STORY
Billy is a great jazz musician that has a regular concert date on Saturday nights in a jazz club of his small native town. The music is ready for performance, he’s playing at his best (as usual), his bandmates are in a good mood and people in the audience are having a great time. In the middle of the 2nd set, another musician enters the venue. He’s a fantastic, really well-known musician from outside town. He finds his way through the crowd and sits right in front of the stage, first row. From the stage, Billy recognizes him, of course. He says to himself:” Hey, that’s Kenny Watson from New-York… I think he was playing tonight in the concert hall with his band. Wow!! this guys is so great!” So while deciding on the next tune, he starts feeling his heart beating faster and louder, his breathing speed has increased, he has dry mouth and his hands start to shake a bit. First of all, he counts off the piece (a bit too fast…), then BOOM, memory blank—He forgets parts of the melody. He starts improvising, but after a chorus or two, he gets lost in the form. While wanting to get back on track, he feels that he can’t because he forgot the chord changes. A feeling of confusion, fear and insecurity takes him over. All that time, the music is playing but he feels like he is outside of it, like as if he was in a completely different place and time frame. Confused, he finally stops playing in the middle of the bridge section, forcing the piano player to abruptly take over.
After the show, the piano player comes to him and asks: “Hey, what happened in that tune we played? You were doing so well all night, and all of a sudden, you seemed to have lost it.” The answer to that question was: “I don’t know…”
Even though he usually stays at the venue to talk to people he knows, he quickly packs up his gears and leaves. On his way home, he bumps into one of his long time friend who asks him about the performance: “So, how did the gig go tonight??”
He answers: “It went so bad… I’m the worst player on the planet, I can’t play anymore. I think I should quit…”
Looking at the situation,it is obvious that stress interfered with Billy’s capacity to improvise fluently, but how exactly?
First, let’s take a look inside the improviser’s mind.
Let’s now investigate stress, and see how it can interfere with the musician’s improvisational capacities.
In musical improvisation, as in any complex cognitive task, the control of attention is a key factor for success. But, what is attention? How does it work? Does stress have any effect on it?
Arousal and performance are linked together by the Inverted-U shape diagram. If the arousal level is too low or too high, it will affect the performance negatively. The optimal performance zone (the optimal arousal level to complete a certain task) is different for everybody. Stress can have a positive effect on attention if it does not go beyond a certain level. If it does, the effects can be debilitating. Findings showed that a high level of stress can create attentional narrowing which is the involuntary reduction in the range of cues that can be utilized by an individual. (Prinet & Sarter, 2015) Also, impairments in different attention tasks were detected in participants with high stress level and emotional arousal (i.e. Hancock & Warm, 1989, Heckens et al., 2012, Olver et al., 2015). Under stress, the attention automatically seeks for threatening stimuli, drifting away from the task at hand. It is therefore more difficult to stay focused on the same stimulus for a long period of time. The act of improvising within an ensemble is an even more complex task, since communication comes into play. The musician is not only creating his own musical fragments, but also reacting to other people’s musical ideas. A situation like this requires a great amount of attention, employing all fives types of attention outlined in the clinical model. During a concert, they are all used, at one time or another, to achieve an optimal performance. Improvising also seems to require both attentional types: external, (in order to stay aware of as many auditory and visual cues as possible given by other band members, for example) and internal (to remember previously played melodies and rhythm and developed them while soloing, to think of different combination of melodic fragments, etc.). But in both types, the broad attention style tends to make the improvising musician more successful, since there’s less discrimination of specific sounds or feeling, which will put the musician into a “wide open” optimal receptive type of mindset. As mentioned earlier, studies on the impact of stress on attention show an impairment in the focused, sustained, selective, and divided categories of the model. (Olver et al., 2015) Also, results showed to be associated to an attentional narrowing. (Prinet & Sarter, 2015) The fact that the stressed musician’s attention will tend to drift towards the threatening stimuli will distract him from the task at hand (e.g. musical improvisation), therefore resulting in an impaired musical performance.
In addition of attention, memory plays a great role in improvisation fluency. In fact, what is memory? In what way can it be affected by stress?
In their 2016 review, Ness & Calabrese reported that stress and emotional arousal can affect memory both on quantitative (that is time-dependent) and qualitative aspects. Memory encoding process vs memory retrieval process. The authors report that studies on quantitative memory performances have been focusing mostly on hippocampus-dependent. It has been found that stress as time-dependent effects of the stressor on encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. A stressor occurring just before or after the encoding process might have an enhancing effect on it (Abercrombie, Speck & Monticelli, 2006). Also, in periods of higher stress and emotional arousal, the memorization of negative information is enhanced while the neutral information memorization seems impaired. As far as the retrieval phase, the authors wrote that, generally speaking, in high emotional arousal and high stress situation an impairment has been shown. Researchers also found that emotional arousal is essential to impairment, since pharmacologically-induced increases in glucocorticoid levels do not impair memory retrieval in a non-arousing situation. In general, a physiological stress response is beneficial when occurring during the learning episode but impairs memory function when experienced during retrieval. Hippocampus-dependent cognitive memory vs striatum-dependent habit memory: A competitive relationship. Stress and emotional arousal affects the memory processing mode. In fact, a competitive relationship between cognitive and habit memory seems to be in place. Along that line, a study by Schwabe & Wolf (2012) has shown that in presence of stressors, people tend to switch from the declarative hippocampal strategy to the non-declarative striatum-based strategy. In that same In an improvised music setting, if retrieval process is impaired by stress, it is quite obvious that the quality of the performance will suffer. According to Pressing’s improvisation model, memory retrieval of pre-learned cues is essential to improvisation fluency. If those bits of information are not known enough by the performer, there is a good chance that he will forget about them when the stress situation comes up. As mentioned above, the habit memory is generally taking over the cognitive memory in stressful situations. A conclusion can be made that the musician will tend to play his habitual language, instead of being able to react to sounds that are made in the moment.review, Ness & Calabrese wrote that findings suggest that the preference for striatum-dependent habit learning strategies under stress appears to be a result of both enhanced habit memory and impaired cognitive memory. It can be concluded that a shift from cognitive to habit memory systems under stress can rescue task performance and the attempt to engage the declarative memory system during the experience of stress event disrupts task performance.
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