Participatory Sense Making in Jazz Performance: Agents’ Expressive Alignment

Abstract

Relationships between musicians in Jazz performance can be understood as autonomous (turn-taking) versus simultaneous (playing joint), both assumed as social interactions that take place as to create meaning in a participatory way. To participate, in music performance, requires expressive alignment, in order to share the act of producing and perceiving sound and movement in an embodied- inter(en)acted phenomenological experience. In such context, interaction is assumed as an expressive exchange of meanings. In this work, we study a trio jazz performance from an inter(en)acted approach, applying a methodological design that combines objective/statistical measures, and subjective/phenomenological data. An experiment that tested different conditions of turn-taking and/or joint playing of a Jazz standard was conducted in a recording studio session. All the performances were registered through audio/video media, and motion capture technology. In addition, in-depth interviews before playing/after recordings were conducted. Time series data related to sound and movement were analysed to study features of expressive alignment, accounting for descriptors of participatory sense-making. A Sense Granger measure was developed from Granger Causality measures in order to describe expressive alignment between-and-within performers. Significant differences were found in situations of turn-taking, and simultaneous playing between conditions. Results show that, beyond such differences, jazz musicians sustain interactional transactions based on their phenomenological experience of ‘going together in time’. Sense-Granger measures serve to account for the ways expressive alignment evolves over time, providing significant cues that help to understand participatory sense-making in jazz performance.