© UnknownAaron Berkowitz at the keyboard.
What's involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs?Aaron Berkowitz, a Harvard graduate student in ethnomusicology, and Daniel Ansari, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, recently collaborated on an experiment designed to study brain activity during musical improvisation in order to get closer to answering these questions. The Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative awarded the collaborators a grant to look at musical improvisation in trained musicians, utilizing brain scans done with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. A resulting paper, "Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation," was published in the journal
NeuroImage, and received the journal's 2008 Editor's Choice Award in Systems Neuroscience.
"There are essentially two basic questions in music cognition," says Berkowitz. "First, how does the brain 'do' music? That is, what parts of the brain are involved, and how do they interact, when people listen to or perform music? Second, what can studying music tell us about the brain? When music is heard or played, the brain calls on many more general cognitive processes, for example, perceiving patterns in sounds or converting visual information [in a musical score] to auditory or motor information."