Free jazz exemplifies the characteristics of complex systems, where individual musicians come together without a plan and produce incredible music, showcasing the capacity of complex systems to do things beyond the sum of their individual parts.
The dynamics of jazz performances can be studied using ecological concepts and mathematical techniques, enabling the prediction of critical transitions or tipping points where musicians introduce new musical areas that lead to cascading effects of rapid change in the music.
Deep dives
Complexity Science and Free Jazz
In this podcast episode, Tyler Margadis, a cognitive and information sciences professor, explores the connection between complexity science and free jazz. Margadis highlights that free jazz exemplifies the characteristics of complex systems, where individual musicians come together, often without a plan, and produce incredible music. He emphasizes the emergence of unexpected and beautiful sounds that arise from the collective interaction of musicians, showcasing the capacity of complex systems to do things beyond the sum of their individual parts. Additionally, Margadis points out the tension between stability and transformation in jazz, as musicians seamlessly transition from one sound to another. He highlights the decentralized nature of jazz performances, where each musician expresses their own ideas and aesthetic sensibilities, leading to a unified and structured performance without a centralized controller.
Studying Jazz as an Ecosystem
Margadis and his team apply ecological concepts to study the dynamics of jazz music. They use mathematical techniques to convert jazz recordings into trajectories in sound space, representing different sound worlds or stable regimes. By analyzing the variability and wandering of these trajectories, they identify the lead-up to critical transitions or tipping points in jazz performances. They found that as the system becomes less resilient, the musicians exhibit more wandering and variability. The tipping points occur when one musician introduces a new musical area, which is reinforced by others in the ensemble, leading to a cascading effect of rapid change. They were able to predict these transitions by leveraging tools from ecology that identify loss of resilience and approaching critical transitions, even in improvised jazz performances without any written plan.
Creativity and Collective Complexity
The study of jazz as a complex system raises questions about creativity in both individual and collective contexts. While individual jazz musicians introduce creative elements on their own, there is also a collective creativity that emerges when they come together as an ensemble. This collective creativity challenges conventional notions of individual creativity and highlights the power of complex systems to reframe our understanding of creativity. The episode concludes by teasing a future discussion on locating creativity within complex systems that involve both individual and collective creative processes.
If there's one type of music that goes particularly well with complexity science, it's free jazz. The sort of jazz that you get when you put a group of musicians together without a conductor or any written music. But despite this, they still produce incredible music. So how does this group of musicians play so tightly together, whilst creating such dramatic changes to their music?
In this episode, we're joined again by Tyler Marghetis, Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. Tyler is going to return to the concept of tipping points, but this time, he's going to explore tipping points through the context of jazz music. To understand how they occur, he's going to go to one of the most unlikely places for help: the study of ecologies.
Resources and links:
'Zadok the Priest' by Handel - Classical (composed) - This piece tips at 01:22