Improvisation experience predicts how musicians categorize musical structures

Western music improvisers learn to realize chord symbols in multiple ways according to functional classifications, and practice making substitutions of these realizations accordingly. In contrast, Western classical musicians read music that specifies particular realizations so that they rarely make such functional substitutions. We advance a theory that experienced improvisers more readily perceive musical structures with similar functions as sounding similar by virtue of this categorization, and that this categorization partly enables the ability to improvise by allowing performers to make substitutions. We tested this with an oddball task while recording electroencephalography. In the task, a repeating standard chord progression was randomly interspersed with two kinds of deviants: one in which one of the chords was substituted with a chord from the same functional class (“exemplar deviant”), and one in which the substitution was outside the functional class (“function deviant”). For function compared to exemplar deviants, participants with more improvisation experience responded more quickly and accurately and had more discriminable N2c and P3b ERP components. Further, N2c and P3b signal discriminability predicted participants’ behavioral ability to discriminate the stimuli. Our research contributes to the cognitive science of creativity through identifying differences in knowledge organization as a trait that facilitates creative ability.