Introduction

Practice Time

No app, software, or method alone will make someone a seasoned improviser. Opening the next pages with such a bold statement might seem unscientific—which it is—but there is consensus1 among jazz players and teachers that there is no way around lifelong experiences of interacting with fellow musicians. There is also agreement on the value of, in jazz lingo, woodshedding or shedding—i.e., time spent secluded and focused on improving and developing new improvisation skills. Methods and tools are created to help make these sessions more interesting, stimulating, and “productive”.2

Interaction is the key word, because what most play-alongs and software tools3 still lack today is even minimal interactivity. Until artificial intelligence reaches a convincing level of real-time interaction with improvising human musicians, we are stuck with currently existing4 technologies.

The purpose of this research is to critically review one element that is becoming increasingly prominent in music creation apps but hasn’t yet found its way into music learning apps and software on a large scale: randomness. As I will try to demonstrate, it is one small step on the path toward real interaction. How to use and add chance, aleatoric, serendipitous, and surprise features in jazz and pop exercises is the focus of this research, linking it to my Master’s reflection report Kings and Queens of Serendip in Part I on this website. I will illustrate the technical side using adaptive audio technologies from video games to create exercises with random elements.

Electronic tools and helpers have taken a prominent role in music education. I have been involved in and have also created different software projects, listed on this website in the reflection report section (PercussionTutor, FlamencoTutor, Interakt). These apps and software projects all use random features, but, with the exception of Interakt, they only scratch the surface of their potential.

My sources include research on the element of surprise5 in a pedagogical setting as well as on tools (digital and otherwise), e.g., the use of flash cards. Furthermore, I used different jazz bass and improvisation methods to select the exercises that seemed best suited to integrating elements of surprise (cf. research section), with feedback from my bass teachers Matthias Akeo Nowak, John Goldsby, and Jo Didderen.

The 10 lessons in the research part all refer to specific exercises related to improvisation in a jazz and pop music context. When necessary, the different learning objectives and pedagogical and didactic actions are listed for beginner, intermediate, and more advanced students.

  1. Berliner, P. F. (1994). Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. ↩︎

  2. How exactly one might define productivity in improvising remains an open question. ↩︎

  3. iReal Pro or Band-in-a-Box to name just the best known and most widely used. ↩︎

  4. As a reference to the ironic “actually existing capitalism”, as e.g. in Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books. ↩︎

  5. E.g., Fortin, C., Gonzalez, E., & Carle, S. (2017). When the element of surprise fosters learning. Pédagogie Collégiale Vol. 30, N° 3, Spring 2017. ↩︎