Exploring the Relationship Between Musical Improvisation, Creativity, Passion, Environment, and Mental Illness in Music History.

Being an outcast creative myself I have tried back and forth to immerse myself in my passion towards music purposely to examine the creative ability I might have in producing or even reproducing a musical piece, it only makes sense to crown my struggles with a vindication of their existence as I gave space to my creativity, which, by the way, is determined one way or the other by the invisible hands of society and the original artists of the work, as was extensively discussed by?Schiavio & Benedek (2020a).

Reading their comprehensive review?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020a), I thought about a recent experience I had with musical improvisation in electro-acoustic composition. I am not a professional player, nor am I well experienced in music and the time gaps between my practice sessions are enormous, yet I still believe in an unbreakable bond between me and music with no recognition of where it is coming from. Every time I look at my instrument, even when I am not practising, it’s there. What made it more intriguing was realizing that being around other musicians and taking on the role of a musical leader while improvising music. Utilizing the capabilities of all the musicians and their instruments gave me the ability to speak through improvisation, creating good pieces according to the workshop instructor. What was the real source of this creativity or these pieces of musical expression? I had no idea, and it wasn’t just me; every other one of the musicians and the conductors had the music and the performers express their ideas for them seemingly effortlessly as if we were all one being driven forward by the same target, as if every one of us could perceive the other’s muse, given the fact that most of us had never been acquainted before, and some of the orchestra’s members were from a different country with a different background and musical culture.

In their comprehensive review mentioned earlier, Schiavio & Benedek (2020a)?provided more than one piece of evidence that caught my attention and inspired me to elaborate on this experience. One of them, which is the root of all struggles, is the fact that just because you think your work is creative doesn’t have any value if your surrounding society doesn’t feel the same?(Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010), putting creativity in a scope similar to "market research ", if you will. So, I am up there practising the signs of this new language, directing the orchestra in a way that I thought would produce a good melody with the potential to express how I interact with and relate to music, and at the same time, somehow, I knew what I had to add to get my colleagues and instructor’s appeal for it. Perhaps from observing my colleagues playing their instruments in the first couple of hours of the first day, I managed to categorize them in hypothetical musical genres producing a typology that gave me a sense of what this environment can cherish.

The second piece of evidence was that as much as composing music can rely on systematic behaviours, it can also involve impulsivity that is similar to that owned by children and infants in conveying the discoveries made from idiosyncratic experiences with sound, referencing the concept of "teleomusicality" introduced by?Schiavio et al. (2017),?where the music itself is the ultimate goal of the sound production and not social communications?(Schiavio & Kimmel, 2021).

On comparing this concept in both adult and infant improvisers, it was found that both need to be coupled with "agent-environment" interactions to maintain one of the bases of creativity, which is novelty, where such an interaction is required whether the agent is an experienced professional or an experimenting infant?(Schiavio & Kimmel, 2021), showing the role of mental aspects in reorganizing knowledge, skills, experiences, and memories to reinvent their product limitlessly: "How well the skill performs." The reason this information caught my attention was the fascinating idea that infants with no skills still can improvise based on limited (and continuously developing) knowledge acquired from interaction with their environment, and even though it's well recognized that acquiring skills as an expert or "adult" is undeniably essential, can it still be accepted that unskillful adults can improvise good pieces as well? I mean, that’s exactly what I did back there, and not just during conducting the orchestra. But I also remember that one of the exercises required the musicians to follow each other's lead, recomposing a melody that was improvised by one of the musicians. But, for me, barely a beginner, it was impossible prima facie, but then, after listening for a couple of minutes and predicting the sounds that deliberately chosen notes on my guitar could produce (without really memorizing the name of any of the notes) leaning on my memory from practising some well-known songs intermittently throughout the last few years, I managed successfully to reproduce the same simple melody, kind of like, but not exactly, the approach of the "etude" that was popular in the 18th century and was used as a form of teaching music?(Schiavio & Kimmel, 202),?putting the whole experience in the light of the ecological aspects surrounding musical creativity and improvisation as was discussed in infants, where sensory-motor skills are developed in order to go in line with their ecology?(Sheya & Smith, 2010), a process applied to their musical development featuring the interaction with the environment (the sound source), unveiling its potential, then acting on it. This suggests the need to be aware of and actively engaged with the harmony of everything around us in order to achieve the modern concept of "success" in the field of musical and other types of creativity in the field of improvisation?(Schiavio & Kimmel, 2021)

Sensory and perceptual encoding, motor control, performance monitoring, memory storage and recall are processes that are only a part of the complex, multidimensional act of improvisation as described by Bisutti?(2015).?Improvisation as an acquired skill and experience from long-term practice was proven to be distinctive from the skill of merely playing an instrument in neural effects, where the functional connectivity between the brain regions involved (the networking of information) becomes higher than regional activity in well-practised improvisers, increasing the efficiency of information exchange within the associative (memory and learning) networks and thus boosting musical creativity.?(Pinho et al., 2014). It was found that expert improvisers tend to have an inhibited brain region, one that is naturally involved in musical creativity, perhaps through long-term self-centred training. The same region, namely the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), among other involved brain regions, was activated more in social contexts where the decision of the musician depended on others’?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b) (Berkowitz & Ansari, 2010).?It is worth noting that musical creativity cannot be attributed to a single brain area or process?(López-González & Limb, 2012).

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The neuroscience underlying musical improvisation was studied by many researchers, and it is worth noting that in the mentioned studies, samples did include non-musicians to evaluate the network of prefrontal brain regions involved in improvisational behaviour. In the review discussing these studies, the researchers concluded that spontaneous thought cooperates with cognitive control complex networks during improvisatory behaviour?(Beaty, 2015). The ideas presented here are in favour of applying theories like those of Wiggins (2012), who proposed that "spontaneous creativity that happens without a conscious will is the basis of musical composition and is inherent in everyday language generation and different from that required for problem-solving."

"And it's just that it's not even something we consciously do. We just do it. I've never once in all the years we've played together been able to predict what Bob will play or what Phil will play in a given situation, or the drummers, for that matter; you know, I mean, I just have no idea"

Jerry Garcia's interview (Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

Interacting with music, whether you are a player, a listener, or a composer, involves emotion and memory of experiences as well as cognitive functions and divergent thinking?(J?ncke, 2008) (Zatorre & McGill, 2005). Even so, the creative cognitive potential is not enough to estimate musical expression ability?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b).

(Berkowitz & Ansari, 2008a) have assessed the potential of creative music improvisation in non-musicians by studying the invention of novel motor sequences in response to unusual environmental conditions in the context of musical improvisation?(Berkowitz & Ansari, 2008b). Moreover, it was demonstrated by (Schiavio and Benedek (2020b) how creatively forming ideas in a musical composition can be a reflection of the social dynamics of the composer and the flow of information between his or her personal and professional acquaintances. Results of Lu et al. (2015) on 17 music composers using functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that there was an integration between emotional (socially related?(Apps et al., 2016) (Behrens et al., 2009) (Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b)), combinative, and evaluative processes that depend on the context while composing, allowing musicians to manipulate sounds mentally to convey emotions?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). What stopped me there for a while also was the idea that the social effects, regarding constraints and goals, on the shaping of the product of creativity, which does give it variability but, at its core, is ultimately repeating itself, can "problematize" issues relating to copyrights. All the evidence mentioned so far has raised a question in my mind. "Is plagiarism even real?"?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). (Amabile, 1985)?(Csikszentmihalyi: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery, Google Scholar, n.d.)

It was inviting to read about how creativity is no longer considered a divine quality, with only a few people blessed by the gods to have a passageway to it, but rather, it’s really at the heart of the open "back and forth" relationship with your niche.

Then, how is it when you act upon this relationship to extend its presence even if your niche is not around, it leads to uncertainty and the infamous anxiety torturing the creative agent (artist) regarding the outcome of this "adaptive creativity"?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). (Paolo et al., 2017) (Gallagher, 2017).??

An interesting perspective on "being cautious" was also formed in my mind while reading that our brain has recently been considered a predictor of the difference between what we truly sense from our environment and the endless probable events that could ensue, in an attempt to minimize this difference, such activity has the potential to paralyze our movement forward; however, as Schiavio & Benedek (2020b) elaborated, if we don’t move we are in more danger, which our brain wouldn’t simply allow to happen, so maybe this predictive ability would drive us more towards exploring rather than fearing the unknown, and also in favour of minimizing the difference between what we sense and what can happen, we can decide what would our reality have.?(Friston, 2010; Clark, 2015).

Our surrounding environment can offer us everything we need to work with, and we can mentally recognize and reorganize the givens, interacting with the surroundings and predicting the outcome to achieve a creativity that’s not mystical or far out of reach, yet not useless, unlikable, or dull?(Fuchs, 2017) (Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). Take this very article for an example; it was not only inspired by the musical improvisation workshop I attended but also by a show I was watching with my sister, a familiar one called "The Carrie Diaries", specifically the episode referencing Sid Vicious, the late bassist of Sex Pistols, and his condemning with murdering his girlfriend, but more on that in later paragraphs.

Intentionally, creators should accept the fact that the intuition driving the production of their brilliant ideas comes from the conventionality of the world around them, where their skills and unique identity and perspective of the world, which are supposed to come from seemingly unique experiences (I believe that time repeats itself!, which can be discerned in the fact that remembering the past has no use if we are not changing the present and adjusting for the future?(Bartlett et al., 1995), "travelling mentally in time"?(Suddendorf & Busby, 2005)), allow them to re-paint what already exists with the shades of their own authenticity, which couldn’t have been expressed without the open back and forth relationship with their niche.

Moreover, even human consciousness is now considered to be extended and not private to the person?(Valencia & Froese, 2020) (Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b), and it’s also very interesting how telling stories, fictional or real, to each other and ourselves consequently nourishes our adaptation (planning ahead) and consciousness, evolving our intelligence through trust and doubt?(Coen, 2019).?Another way the past stories we share can shape the outcome of our creativity which is amusing enough is our internal clock, it seems to be an excellent adaptor to the environment around us, putting its singularity into question at the same time, changing the perception of "time" contextually for every one of us, as there is no time but times that makeup experience, reflecting our brain's adaptation in a form of temporal distortion giving a fun elaboration on the concept of "agent-environment interaction" as was discussed by?(Droit-Volet & Gil, 2009).

"..influenced by the beatniks in a sense. And they were artists. They were poets, writers, and all kinds of people"?Jerry Garcia's interview (Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

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In his pre-show interview in 1975 in Kezar stadium-San-Francisco?(Classic bone, 2021),?Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist and singer of the "Grateful Dead," emphasised the importance of the surrounding niche of musicians in learning and enhancing creativity:

"If I’m not on the road or touring or something like that, there's still a lot of room for me to play and reach out to, you know, learn in a learning sort of situation and all that. Bluegrass music is something, that's a little different, it's something I’ve always loved, and mainly with bluegrass music, you sort of have to wait for an opportunity to present itself where there are musicians around who understand the music and play it well and hold it in the way that was a result of that kind of sort of a coincidence, where suddenly there was, uh, three or four of us around who knew the music and who enjoyed playing it, and so we started loosely just getting together and playing for fun and then got to be more serious about it as time went on, but really, those things sort of happen accidentally in a way, I don't you know, but really, and I don't you know, but those things sort of -- but really, - but those things sort of ------------ No, I don't think so. I think that it adds to it just in terms of the fact that each thing stays fresh if you're not doing it all the time. You come back to it with new ideas, new influences, and stuff like that.

In the same interview, he implicated the influence of staying relatable to the audience and the surrounding environment on creating "better music."

"..that was the best part. It was certainly, relating to the people and relating to each other on a friendly basis and closely in a family sort of way. It's more rewarding to approach anything that way than it is to do it for success reasons or that sort of thing. You know, it just is better. It just feels better. And I think it produces better music too."

Moreover, the fact that he was from San Francisco and the music genre of his band, or rather the type of music that his band had (either intentionally or intuitively) chosen to evolve, was the improvisational psychedelic music that was flourishing in San Francisco in the 60s, i.e., not something out of his niche.

(Grateful Dead | Members, Songs, & Facts | Britannica, n.d.)

Furthermore, with Sid Vicious being a controversy in and of himself, "The Sex Pistols," the band that led the "Punk" movement in the UK, having built a base of an audience with teenagers who found them relatable, faced opposition to their open expression of an unwanted new genre of music, even becoming a "Public enemy", where Vicious played a significant role, beginning with the nickname, the heroin addiction, and his acts of violence?(The Sex Pistols | Members, Son(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). I found him to be an interesting example to show a different face of the interactions between agent-environment and skilful adaptation as being the drivers of creativity, from the point of view of resistance, the resistance of the norms and the constraints rather than using them, in other words, rebellion as a form of said interaction “.. and maintain viable relationships with the world”(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b).

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In an interview with Judy Vermorel, in 1977?(Slycheetah, 2011), Vicious said a couple of things that inspired the point of view mentioned above:

"Growing up, you've just got no intelligence at all; as soon as somebody stops being a kid, they stop being aware, and it doesn't matter how old you are; you can be 99 and still be a kid, and as long as you're a kid, you're aware."

"..they were made as we wanted them exactly with what we had to say and done exactly how we wanted them on, and like we didn't put them out to make money, we put them out because we wanted to do."?referencing their songs and albums.

As an unskillful bassist he was, he had a unique way of expressing himself, especially when he revived songs in his style of singing.?(Luis Asenjo, 2007)

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"...what I said to him will like what about making something that you're genuinely interested in that really though it means something to you, and look, it sounds a little puzzled by that as you might as well I said what you mean by what you're interested in, it's what the public's interest, and like as far as I'm concerned that's another [__ ] [__ ] You don't [__] You know well that I've got no interest in pleasing the general public at all... "?The fact that he is idealized now further expands how the identity of the agent can influence the niche, so it’s a two-way influence?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b). where Jerry Garcia could have backed up by saying:

"But they were all people whose life experience had been that they were a little out of whack with everything else"?Jerry Garcia's interview?(Matthew Ziegler, 2013), referring to the musicians he worked with.

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A lot of studies have attempted to prove the effects and association of music with mental state and mental illnesses based on the music preferred or chosen by the participants. Before I started working on this article, I wondered whether I was the only person who got high on music. Writing these exact words in the search engine, I came to find that it’s overwhelmingly, extensively studied, and more or less proven by evidence.

(Sharman & Dingle, 2015)?(Gustavson et al., 2021)?(Schaefer, 2017)?(Freeman et al., 2017)?(Sch?fer et al., 2013)?(Ferreri et al., 2019)?(Blood & Zatorre, 2001)?"The citations here are only a small sample of the available evidence."

Declination of mental health had been linked to engagement with music, and simultaneously attributing an "outlet" role to it for patients suffering from depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and substance use, with the need for further research and models addressing the limitations of the current body of literature to be taken into consideration.?(Gustavson et al., 2021).

?Extreme metal music was suggested to be an outlet of anger rather than a cause of it, matching the listeners' level of arousal, sustaining their high heart rate, and inducing positive emotions?(Sharman & Dingle, 2015). However, dopamine has been linked to thought disturbances like schizophrenia and the positive schizophrenic symptoms associated with the mesolimbic system (reward pathway), including delusions, (Davis et al., 1991) (Kesby et al., 2018) (Ferreri et al., 2019),?and since the role of dopamine in music-induced reward was proven pharmacologically?(Ferreri et al., 2019), it might be fair to say that all the icons and even the unknown musicians who are passionate about how music affects the mental state of themselves and their audience are potentially dopamine-fueled psychopaths. I found no proof of it to the best of my knowledge, but it’s a thought that I just had to share!

An uncalled-for, yet polarizing addition is that creative people were found to have distinctions in "romantic" passion toward their partners. Having increased passion overall, they tend to view their partner as more attractive (a positive illusion) than they are; however, there is still a good chance for the creative person to feel less attracted as the duration of the relationship increases.?(Kl et al., 2019)

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I couldn’t help but address the part of Jerry Garcia's interview with Matthew Ziegler (2013) talking about acid tests?(The Acid Tests | Origins, n.d.).

"?They were very liberating for us because, after all, we'd come to our shows on Sunday nights, you know, and after having spent the day stoned on acid up in the woods, we'd come down to the bars and play Saturday night. It was like, you know, we were played sort of maliciously. So, you know, because it was so lame, you know, at that time, we were pretty burned out on it. And so we were ready for something completely free for it. Kind of went along with where we were going, which was, we were experimenting with psychedelics as much as we were playing music so that those things got us a happy new hobby, the acid test, which was exactly free-form enough. And where we were, we had no significance. We weren't famous. Nobody came to the acid test to see us particularly. We got to play or not play, depending on how we felt. We could play anything we could think of, which meant that we didn't have any constraints on our performance. We didn't have to be good or even recognizable. So we got to do, we got to have an opportunity to visit highly experimental places under the influence of highly experimental chemicals before a highly experimental audience. You know, it was ideal, you know, and that was something that we got to do long enough to get used to, you know, and that's the kind of territory that I think very few people have been lucky enough to have that it was like a gift"?Jerry Garcia's interview (Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

This encouraged me to further look into the effect of psychedelic drugs on both musical creativity by the musician (the agent) and the perception of music by the audience (the niche). I looked for a video of one of the concerts using the keyword "Acid Test" because I was curious to hear how the music would sound to someone who wasn’t experimenting with the drug as was the audience at the time and found myself a bit indifferent towards how "amazing" the music actually sounds.?(Zane Kesey, 2022).

?Scientific evidence has supported the effects of LSD on changing the response to music in the brain regions that are involved in music processing on different levels as well as those involved in emotion, memory, and self-referential processing, increasing connectedness and giving meaningful music listening experiences, perhaps different from yours when you watch the concert referenced earlier in this paragraph. There was a secret language, you can say, between the agent and the niche, and they both hypothetically affected each other in the realm of their creation.?(Barrett et al., 2018) (O’Callaghan et al., 2020). Moreover, it was proven that psychedelics can affect different aspects related to creative thinking that could be differentiated in time and construct, increasing spontaneous creativity while decreasing task-based creativity; even after the drug intake for several days, novel ideas kept coming to subjects increasingly?(Mason et al., 2021). Also, the a decrease in convergent thinking?(Wie?ner et al., 2022),?where divergent thinking was linked to creativity addressing it as a product of generalized skilful adaptation.?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b)

"Everybody was entertaining everything. There was entertainment at every event. Everything that happened was entertaining. And it didn't need to. You didn't need expertise, you know what I mean? So you didn't need the musician chauvinism, you know, and the artistry of it is something like, I could do something you can't do, you know. Now all that stuff went up in smoke, which I think was very good. You know, it's good for everybody. Everyone learned a lot from that process.

I think everybody who ever went to an acid test came out a different person, you know, and loved it.

the community was like and how the dead lived. Well, there wasn't us there, you know; there were a lot of people there that were like us. They were there; some people had spent their entire lives there.

They'd been a little bit different, you know, from everybody else. They were the people that were looking for something different"??Jerry Garcia's interview with Matthew Ziegler (2013).

Commenting on what Garcia is trying to say here, I believe it’s fair to mention that improvisational practices have shown to have educational, creative, and social bonding benefits, among others, even now when they were conducted through virtual co-presence using technology and computers instead of physical attendance. In these settings, they showed to flourish in terms of creativity. Moreover, the support the less experienced musicians have felt in these types of experiments is suggested to allow for spontaneous key decisions by the members of the group, that allow in turn for novel and valuable improvisation, which have the affordance of inter?(R. MacDonald et al., 2021) (Clift et al., 2010) (R. A. R. MacDonald & Wilson, 2020)

Improvisation in a sense that’s "moment to moment" decisions made to utilize the complexity of the environment surrounding the agent—not necessarily a musician—(R. MacDonald et al., 2021),?can offer some ground for the explanation of the view of creativity as a skilful adaptation to engage with, make use of, and innovate in our environment (niche)?(Schiavio & Benedek, 2020b), which by the way can operate both consciously and unconsciously?(R. MacDonald et al., 2021). Interestingly, comparing improvisation to standard prepared-for-performances showed less uncoordinated movements between performers and fewer bodily movements overall; also, the degree of risk-taking and "mind-reading" between co-performers and exchanging composed notes showed differences. The best part was how the audience related emotionally more to the improvised performances; it proved to be a communicable "state of mind" between the audience and performers, increasing awareness and alerting related brain activity in both.?(Dolan et al., 2018) (Setzler & Goldstone, 2020).?Moreover, working or performing in groups was found to better alleviate the effects of inconveniences by combining coordination with individual cognitive abilities?(Glowinski et al., 2016).

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"So more on the point that essentially what happened at that one moment when it was together, well.

What happened was that everybody got a glimpse of something. You know, I don't know; I can't say what it is.

I don't know what it is. I know to me it was like, might have been something like limitless possibilities, you know what I mean? Something like that, maybe, you know. But I mean, the thing was that in the meantime, in my life,

like an infinite amount of material that has been deposited, you know, and all I have to do is tune into it, which is easy to do because it's always there, you know?

So it's, you know, I mean, you know, I don't know how to say it"?Jerry Garcia's interview with?Matthew Ziegler (2013)

Musicians in a large group showed coordination while improvising without a leader or a plan on two levels: on the level of deciding to take action (to start or stop playing) and on the level of their intentional support for the direction the group is taking to produce the music or diverge from it as was found by?(Goupil et al., 2020).

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"We've never been able to decide what to play at all, you know. So back then, we were much freer for it because we just weren't able to

decide what to play. So somebody would just start something. And the way we've handled it since then..."?Jerry Garcia’s interview (Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

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"It's not for me. I don't know a certain amount of also; if you ask somebody to play something, they'll never play it. And so it produces a kind of music—music by confluence, you know, or by friction, or by opposites, you know, it's conflicted. It is, and that makes it interesting.

It has a great deal of tension, you know because everybody plays so differently from each other"?Jerry Garcia’s interview?(Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

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The ability to improvise has been attributed to our ability to adapt to the changes in our environment and to coordinate with its elements and with others, showing its significance as an intellectual skill that shows essentiality in music’s novel expressing performances, where musicians need to stay in coordination with their co-performers "spontaneously" through coordinating their bodily movements and not just through cognitive and conceptual knowledge, both constraining and freeing each other’s performances, moulding it. Walton et al. (2015) Walton et al. (2018)

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"I don't remember where I learned it. I don't remember who taught it to me or even why I chose it, except that it's just a nice song. And I thought it would be ideal to do it with an electric?band"

Jerry Garcia's interview?(Matthew Ziegler, 2013)

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