The composer sits at his piano, an irked grimace on his face. He scribbles a few lines on some messy parchment. He stops, shakes his head and crosses out the lot of what he's written, the tip of his quill scratching angrily.
He appears to be in his own world, wholly ignorant of his surroundings.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration flickers across his face. He excitedly pounds a few keys and then smiles to himself knowingly.
Exaggerated, perhaps, but is this caricature of the detached, eccentric genius at work so far from the truth?
Most original music is indeed created through a combination of spontaneity and creative inspiration.
Until recently, though, where that "creative inspiration" comes from was a subject of debate. Many musicians have noted the altered state of mind during which most of their spontaneous creativity takes place, a time when their actions lie outside their conscious awareness or control.
The Greco-Roman "muse" theory has long been debunked, but research hasn't progressed much further.
Now, a study by Hopkins scientist Charles Limb and his colleague Allen Braun, from the National Institutes of Health, has uncovered a specific pattern of brain activity that may underlie musical improvisation. "I think that many arts share the same intuitive, creative flash that is both deliberate but also completely spontaneous and random," Limb said.
Limb and Braun used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a popular and increasingly instructive method of imaging the brain's activation in real time, while test subjects are actually completing a task.
In this case, the researchers recruited six highly trained jazz pianists from the Peabody Institute, the music school at Hopkins, and put them inside an fMRI machine with a specially designed, non-magnetizable keyboard. An fMRI machine is essentially a hugely powerful magnet.
Jazz was chosen as a medium because, Limb said, "unlike any other musical genres, improvisation is the essence of jazz." Indeed, no two jazz solos are the same, but even the most "unscripted behavior" is based off the context of a given composition and occurs within a framework of musical rules.
In order to mimic real-life improvisation as realistically as possible, the researchers designed their experiment to include some limitations on their musician-subjects' ability to improvise. They set up two situations in order to impart both "scientific rigor" and "high-level musicality" to their study, Limb said.
The pianists were allowed to improvise in both situations, but the level of musical complexity with which they were allowed to improvise varied between the two.
In the low-complexity case, they were "highly constrained," Limb noted. As a control, subjects were asked to play a one-octave C-major scale repeatedly. When it came time for improvisation, they were only allowed to play quarter notes in the C-major scale within the same octave. That's kind of like telling Mozart to compose a symphony on only four piano keys.
The high-complexity case was slightly more involved. The pianists had been asked to memorize a jazz composition beforehand. Then, in the fMRI machine, they were asked to play it from memory to establish a baseline.
Subsequently, the subjects were required only to use that composition's underlying chord structure as a basis for their improvisation. The rest was up to them. In this case, Limb said, "the musicians could really play as they wished."
The results were intriguing. Brain activity was nearly identical in both cases, Limb said, suggesting that the "altered state of mind" that occurs during improvisation is independent of musical complexity.
What's more, the researchers were able to connect improvisation to a very specific pattern of activity in certain brain areas, and one area, the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in particular.
The finding that the PFC is involved in improvisation wasn't a surprise, as it's often thought of as the center of higher cognitive processes. What was intriguing, however, was the contrast between deactivation and activation in different parts of the PFC.
Deactivation was seen in the lateral area of the PFC, which has been shown to consciously monitor, evaluate and correct an individual's goal-directed behavior. In other words, the musicians' normal, rational minds were subdued during improvisation.
In contrast, marked activation was observed in areas closer to the brain's midline, a region many psychologists believe underlies an "autobiographical narrative." This narrative is the intensely personal story of your own life, all of your memories and thoughts and beliefs.
PFC activity thus matched up precisely with the cognitive steps one would theoretically need to take in order to improvise jazz. A suspension of goal-directed behavior along with a heightening of personally relevant, internally generated behavior would allow unconscious thoughts and ideas to flow, while conscious strategies would be inhibited.
Limb and his colleagues noted that a similar pattern of brain activity is seen in people under hypnosis, or as they meditate or daydream.
Nonetheless, whether these results are universally applicable is uncertain. The study was done in a specific context (jazz piano) and used an elite population (expert jazz pianists).
"Professional players are very capable of getting in the zone musically, while amateur musicians might be struggling with rudimentary aspects of music performance and never really enter a state of real creative outflow," Limb said.
Still, Limb suspects that improvisation-specific patterns similar to those observed in the jazz pianists' brains will be found elsewhere, such as in the brains of painters and writers. The mythical key to creative genius may soon be found.
