Collective improvisation is remarkable. When people
improvise—whether dancing, making music, or conversing—
they coordinate their behavior while exploring abstract spaces
of movements, sounds, and ideas. How do improvisers navigate
these abstract spaces? One possibility is that improvisation
builds on foraging strategies used to search the physical
world. Here, we investigate the dynamics of an especially
complex and abstract form of collective improvisation: free
jazz. We quantify how professional jazz ensembles navigate
a space of sounds and show that it resembles a foraging strategy
known as Area Restricted Search. In particular, ensembles
change their playing dynamics in response to encounters with
novel ‘soundworlds.' Before encountering a new soundworld,
ensembles engage in widespread exploration; immediately after,
they shift to focused exploitation of the new sound. While
collective improvisation pushes at our cognitive limits and is a
paradigm of human creativity, it may build on evolutionarilyancient
strategies for searching space.