Commentary on Frieler, Pfleiderer, Abeßer, and Zaddach's "Telling a Story"

Abstract

Theoretical and methodological perspectives are offered. Perceived personal involvement, variety of improvisational tools, and dramaturgy might be attributed to multimodal signals and cues of emotion, implicit learning of motor routines and musical tendency, and deliberate planning on the part of the musician. I give a personal perspective on my experience as an improvising musician, and suggest a sketch of how I imagine improvisation often works. Dramaturgical models meant for iteratively constructed artworks such as plays are likely to be deficient for improvisational artworks in general. Finally, the authors' methodological choices are considered. Both exploratory research and model selection are also driven by implicit hypotheses, so care must be taken to minimize false discovery.