When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of
music their behaviors are not fully prescribed in advance.
Nonetheless their actions become so tightly coordinated and
their decisions so seamlessly intertwined that the musicians
behave as a single synergistic unit rather than a collection of
individuals. A fundamental aspect of such musical
improvisation is the bodily movement coordination that occurs
among the performing musicians, with the embodied
interaction of musicians both supporting and constraining
musical creativity. Here we consider the ability of pairs of
piano players to improvise, to spontaneously coordinate their
actions with co-performers. We demonstrate the ability of the
time-evolving patterns of inter-musician movement
coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of nonlinear
time series analyses to provide a new understanding of
what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action.
Cross wavelet spectral analysis is applied to the musical
movements of pairs of improvising pianists, a method that
isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral
coordination across a range of nested time-scales. Additionally,
cross-recurrence quantification analysis is applied to the series
of notes produced by each musician to assess when and how
often they visit the same musical states throughout the
improvisation. Revealing the sophistication of the previously
unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between
improvising musicians is an important step towards
understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from
the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies