Abstract
Joint actions typically involve a sense of togetherness that has a distinctive phenomenological component. While it has been hypothesized that group size, hierarchical structure, division of labour, and expertise impact agents’ phenomenology during joint actions, the studies conducted so far have mostly involved dyads performing simple actions. We explore in this study the complex case of collectively improvised musical performances, focusing particularly on the way group size and interactional patterns modulate the phenomenology of joint action. We recorded two expert improvisation ensembles of contrasting sizes (16 vs 4 musicians) and collected data about their musical behaviour, as well as reports about five aspects of their phenomenology (sense of agency, agentive identity, integration, dependence, reflexivity) and about their musical intentions. Our overall data enabled us to assess how those five phenomenological dimensions related to one another during jointly improvised performances. They also show how such phenomenology varied with the way improvisers dynamically related to one another throughout the performance. Finally, we observe that group size strongly altered the phenomenology of improvisers who otherwise shared many characteristics (high expertise, similar aesthetic preferences, etc.). Our study thus sheds light on the interactional and structural parameters that shape and modulate our felt experience when acting together, and thereby highlights the importance of pluralism for studying the phenomenology of joint action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See https://onceim.fr/ and https://www.umlautrecords.com/collectif-umlaut/ for more information about each ensemble.
The names of the ONCEIM members have been fully anonymized (using the following convention: OM1, OM2, ..., OM34) in (Canonne, 2018). We follow here the same convention. Since the article was published in an online journal without page numbers, we refer to the numbering of the paragraph instead.
The audio-video recordings of the ONCEIM and UMLAUT performances can be seen respectively at the following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DzW1061P54; https://youtu.be/uYCPqaOx8jg [retrieved on 27/09/2020].
This report was produced as part of a previous study, conducted in Paris in 2011 (Canonne & Garnier, 2012). The musician quoted is in fact a member of both the ONCEIM and the Umlaut quartet in the present study.
References
Aucouturier, J. J., & Canonne, C. (2017). Musical friends and foes : The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions. Cognition, 161, 94–108.
Bailey, D. (1992). Musical improvisation: Its nature and practice. Da Capo Press.
Barlas, Z., & Obhi, S. S. (2013). Freedom, choice, and the sense of agency. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 514. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00514
Barnett, L., & Seth, A. K. (2014). The MVGC multivariate granger causality toolbox: A new approach to granger-causal inference. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2013.10.018
Berliner, P. (1994). Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation. University of Chicago Press.
Blum, D. (1986). The art of quartet playing: The Guarneri quartet in conversation with David Blum. Victor Gollancz Ltd..
Bolt, N. K., Poncelet, E. M., Schultz, B. G., & Loehr, J. D. (2016). Mutual coordination strengthens the sense of joint agency in cooperative action. Consciousness and Cognition, 46, 173–187.
Bolt, N. K., & Loehr, J. D. (2017). The predictability of a partner’s actions modulates the sense of joint agency. Cognition, 161, 60–65.
Butterfill, S. (2017). Coordination joint action. In The Routledge handbook of collective intentionality (pp. 68–82). Routledge.
Canonne, C. (2018). Rehearsing free improvisation? An ethnographic study of free improvisers at work. Music Theory Online, 24(4).
Canonne, C. (2021). Improvisation in the lab. Urborigène Records.
Canonne, C., & Garnier, N. (2012). Cognition and segmentation in collective free improvisation: An exploratory study. In E. Cambouropoulos, C. Tsougras, P. Mavromatis, & K. Pastiadis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th international conference on music perception and cognition and the 8th triennal conference of the European society for the cognitive sciences of music (pp. 197–214). Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Chang, A., Kragness, H. E., Livingstone, S. R., Bosnyak, D. J., & Trainor, L. J. (2019). Body sway reflects joint emotional expression in music ensemble performance. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 205. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-36358-4
Cochrane, T. (2017). Group flow. In M. Lesaffre, P.-J. Maes, & M. Leman (Eds.), The Routledge companion to embodied music interaction (pp. 133–140). Routledge.
Corbett, J. (2016). A listener’s guide to free improvisation. University of Chicago Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row.
D'Ausilio, A., Badino, L., Li, Y., Tokay, S., Craighero, L., Canto, R., Aloimonos, Y., & Fadiga, L. (2012). Leadership in orchestra emerges from the causal relationships of movement kinematics. PLoS One, 7(2012), e35757.
Denzler, B. and Guionnet, J.-L. 2020. The practice of musical improvisation. Dialogues with Contemporary Musical Improvisers. Bloomsbury.
Dokic, J. (2010). Affordances and the sense of joint agency. In M. Balconi (Ed.), Neuropsychology of the sense of agency (pp. 23–43). Springer.
Dreyfus, H. (2016). In M. A. Wrathall (Ed.), Skillful coping. Essays on the phenomenology of everyday perception and action. Oxford University Press.
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2007). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press.
Goupil, L., Saint-Germier, P., Rouvier, G., et al. (2020). Musical coordination in a large group without plans nor leaders. Scientific Reports, 10, 20377. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77263-z
Haggard, P. (2005). Conscious intention and motor cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(6), 290–295.
Haggard, P., & Eitam, B. (Eds.). (2015). The sense of agency. Oxford University Press. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190267278.001.0001/acprof-9780190267278.
Hilt, P., Badino, L., D’Ausilio, A., Volpe, G., Tokay, S., Fadiga, L., & Camurri, A. (2019). Multi-layer adaptation of group coordination in musical ensembles. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42395-4
Høffding, S. (2019). A phenomenology of music absorption. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kingsbury, L., & Hong, W. (2020). A multi-brain framework for social interaction. Trends in Neurosciences, 43, 651–666.
Knoblich, G., Butterfill, S., & Sebanz, N. (2011). Psychological research on joint action: Theory and data. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 54, 59–101.
Koriat, A. (2000). The feeling of knowing: Some metatheoretical implications for consciousness and control. Consciousness and Cognition, 9(2 Pt 1), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.2000.0433
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, H. B. (2014). lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models (lmer objects of lme4 package). R.
Le Bars, S., Devaux, A., Nevdal, T., Chambon, V., & Pacherie, E. (2020). Agents' pivotality and reward fairness modulate sense of agency in cooperative joint action. Cognition, 195, 104116.
Loehr, J. D. (2018). Shared credit for shared success: Successful joint performance strengthens the sense of joint agency. Consciousness and Cognition, 66, 79–90.
McNeill, W. H. (1995). Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Harvard University Press.
Matuszewski, B. (2019). Soundworks. A framework for networked music systems on the web. State of affairs and new developments. Proceedings of the Web Audio Conference WAC 2019.
Michael, J. (2017). Music performance as joint action. In The Routledge companion to embodied music (pp. 160–166). Routledge.
Montero, B. G. (2016). Thought in action. In Expertise and the conscious mind. Oxford University Press.
Mylopoulos, M., & Shepherd, J. (2020). Agentive phenomenology. In U. Kriegel (Ed.), Oxford handbook of the philosophy of consciousness. Oxford University Press.
Pacherie, E. (2008). The phenomenology of action: A conceptual framework. Cognition, 107, 179–217.
Pacherie, E. (2012). The phenomenology of joint action: Self-agency versus joint agency. In A. Seeman (Ed.), Joint attention: New developments in psychology, philosophy of mind, and social neuroscience (pp. 343–389). The MIT Press.
Pacherie, E. (2014). How does it feel to act together? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13, 25–46.
Pacherie, E. (2015). Time to act: The dynamics of agentive experiences. In P. Haggard & B. Eitam (Eds.), The sense of agency (pp. 3–24). Oxford University Press.
Prevost, E. (1995). No sound is innocent. Copula.
Salice, A., Høffding, S., & Gallagher, S. (2019). Putting plural self-awareness into practice: The phenomenology of expert musicianship. Topoi, 38, 197–209.
Sawyer, K. (2017). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York: Basic Books.
Seabold, S., and Perktold, J. (2010). “statsmodels: Econometric and statistical modeling with python.” Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference.
Seeman, A. (2009). Joint agency: Intersubjectivity, sense of control, and the feeling of trust. Inquiry, 52(5), 500–515.
Sutton, J., Mcilwain, D., Christensen, W., & Geeves, A. (2011). Applying intelligence to the reflexes: Embodied skills and habits between Dreyfus and Descartes. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42, 78–103.
Synofzik, M., Vosgerau, G., & Newen, A. (2008). Beyond the comparator model: A multifactorial two-step account of agency. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(1), 219–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2007.03.010
Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014). Music and social bonding: “Self-other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1096.
Vesper, C., Abramova, E., Bütepage, J., Ciardo, F., Crossey, B., Effenberg, A., Hristova, D., Karlinsky, A., McEllin, L., Nijssen, S., Schmitz, L., & Wahn, B. (2017). Joint action: Mental representations, shared information and general mechanisms for coordinating with others. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2039.
Virani, V. (2019). Dual consciousness and unconsciousness: The structure and spirituality of polymetric tabla compositions. In R. Herbert, D. Clarke, & E. Clarke (Eds.), Music and consciousness 2. Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by ANR MICA (ANR-17-CE27-0021, to C.C.) and a H2020-MSCA-IF-2018 grant (JDIL, 845859, to L.G.). The authors thank all the musicians who participated in the study, as well as Frédéric Blondy and Karl Naëgelen. We also thank Benjamin Matuszewski for helping with the design of the annotation interface.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
C.C., L.G., G.R., and P.S-G designed the experiment. D.S. designed the digital interface used in the annotation task. C.C., G.R, P.S-G and D.S. collected the data. G.R and D.S. pre-processed the data. L.G. analyzed the data, and C.C., L.G. and P.S-G interpreted the data. P.S.-G., C.C., and L.G. wrote the paper.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical approval and consent
Ethical approval for this study was obtained at INSEAD/ Sorbonne University Center for Behavioural Science, Paris, France. All methods were carried out in accordance with their guidelines and regulations. All participants signed an informed consent.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Saint-Germier, P., Goupil, L., Rouvier, G. et al. What it is like to improvise together? Investigating the phenomenology of joint action through improvised musical performance. Phenom Cogn Sci (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09789-0
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09789-0