Musical improvisation reveals the fine-grained foraging dynamics of collective innovation
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Collective innovation is key to the global success of the human species. However, the moment-to-moment details of how creative innovation is accomplished by a collective remain unclear. One challenge is that while creative products (e.g., scientific breakthroughs, technological inventions, rehearsed performances) may be public, the creative processes that generated those products are often private. Here we introduce collective musical improvisation as a model system for the fine-grained study of in vivo collective innovation. In free jazz improvisation, the creative product is the creative process, offering a unique real-time window into the creative process. Using a corpus of free jazz recordings, we embedded each track as a trajectory through a high-dimensional “sonic space” and then analyzed the strategies by which musicians moved collectively through this space of sonic possibility. Despite the cognitive sophistication and cultural richness of musical improvisation, we find that musical ensembles spontaneously adopt a search strategy, Area Restricted Search, with deep evolutionary roots, previously identified in animal foraging. This convergence between behavioral ecology, cognition, and culture suggests deep evolutionary origins of the human capacity for collective innovation.
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415768391