Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.