Is there something peculiar in our appreciation of improvised music? How does knowing that the music we are listening to is improvised affect our experience? As a first step in answering these questions, I have conducted an experiment in which an audio recording of the very same piece of music – a saxophone/clarinet freely improvised duet – was presented to 16 listeners, either as an improvisation ("IMPRO" condition), or as the live performance of a composition for saxophone and clarinet ("COMPO" condition). Listeners were encouraged both to reflect on their listening experience and to describe in their own words the music they heard. First, evaluative judgments were strongly different in the two listening conditions: listeners approached the piece with specific sets of values in mind, by relying on different features or different kinds of criteria (aesthetic ones in the COMPO condition vs ethical ones in the IMPRO condition) to ground their appreciative judgments. Second, and maybe more importantly, listening experiences were quite different in the two conditions: in the COMPO condition, the piece was more commonly experienced as a sonic product , with listeners paying great attention to the various acoustical effects achieved by the musicians and to the overall structure (or lack thereof); in the IMPRO condition, the music was often described as a kind of communicational or relational process , with descriptions that largely interweaved music-specific terms and more broadly social terms. Overall, this experiment shows that our listening experience can be dramatically affected by modal considerations, i.e., by how we think the music was produced. More specifically, it sheds some light on what constitutes the core of the aesthetic experience of improvisation by exhibiting what is centrally at play (and what is not) when we listen to collectively improvised music.

中文翻译：

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聆听即兴演奏

我们对即兴音乐的欣赏有什么特别之处吗？知道我们正在听的音乐是即兴创作的，如何影响我们的体验？作为回答这些问题的第一步，我进行了一个实验，其中将同一首音乐的录音-萨克斯管/单簧管自由即兴演奏的二重奏-呈现给16位听众，即兴即兴（“ IMPRO”条件），或作为萨克斯管和单簧管乐曲的现场表演（“ COMPO”状态）。鼓励听众反思自己的听觉体验，并用自己的语言描述所听的音乐。首先，两种聆听条件下的评估判断都存在很大差异：聆听者在聆听作品时会牢记特定的价值观，通过依靠不同的特征或不同类型的标准（COMPO条件下的审美标准和IMPRO条件下的道德标准）来做出有价值的判断。其次，也许更重要的是，两种情况下的聆听体验是完全不同的：在COMPO条件下，该乐曲作为一种声音产品更常被体验，聆听者非常注意音乐家和音乐人所获得的各种声学效果。整体结构（或缺乏整体结构）；在IMPRO条件下，音乐通常被描述为一种沟通或关系过程，其描述在很大程度上混入了音乐特定术语和更广泛的社会术语。总体而言，该实验表明，模态注意事项会极大地影响我们的听力体验，即 通过我们认为音乐产生的方式。更具体地说，它通过展示当我们聆听集体即兴演奏的音乐时在演奏中的中心点（而非什么在演奏中）而揭示了即兴美学体验的核心。