I think it was about the time I became 50 years old. One morning, as I always do, I was practicing piano in my room before the lesson. All of a sudden this thought came to me, “I have been playing piano since I was 3 years old, and still struggling to make music. Even if I continue this, I will play the music in the same level, when I reach 70 year old or 100 years old!”.
The first time in my life, I started a research about “practicing”, then not before too long, I came to realize that the brain is a key factor in practicing. Even time of Chopin, many including himself knew the relationship between piano playing and the brain function very well.
The most of my understanding of the brain and piano came from the book I read, “Art of Piano Playing”, written by George Kochevitsky, who I think was a professor at the conservatory in St. Petersburg. He explained in details as to how and which part of the brain works to which practice. This book helped me so much that I am practicing now in almost completely different way from the time before I read this book.
Since I learned so much I wanted to share some of my discoveries with my students but this book was only translated into English. So, I searched again for the similar book in Japanese and found, “Deciphering Pianist’s Brain” by Shinichi Furuya. (The title translation is my own. It is not an official one).
This also is a wonderful book in which I learned so much as well, however, at the end of a book, one sentence,”Improvisation is a method that what stored in the brain come out in random, therefore improvisation in Jazz is not a true improvisation”.
Some part I agree but as a Jazz musician I can’t agree 100%.
What I can agree is that the improvisation as a process, his description is probably correct. In this respect, improvisation might not create “purely new things” as whatever stored in the brain comes out. For this AI will beat humans in very short time. It will collect all the data and improvise in the near future. AI will even interact with other musicians during improvisation. Maybe AI will take the job of human musicians, 50%? or more? Whatever the case, once AI learns how to improvise, AI will beat us, as it will probably do a perfect job.
Now, disagreement..
When we improvise, sometimes this strange thing happens.
We play what we don’t know.
It is a weird thing to say but it is true. When it happens, we play something with the feeling we didn’t know, the notes and harmony we didn’t know. It almost feels like the music goes beyond us, and its there. This strange thing about improvisation, many great Jazz musicians have stated. This includes those legends who created Jazz music. I did experiences a small portion of that feeling as well.
But obviously we can’t go into this state of mind easily. It might be this reason that many musicians have gone for drugs, religion, or search for the truth in universe, just to get into this strange state of mind.
I personally don’t drink and play, or I don’t do drugs and no specific religion. But I do think on improvisation our brain functions in the way that goes beyond the regular analysis of brain.
This might be that part we can beat AI.
AI piles up huge data and act using those data, but AI can’t analyze what our brain don’t know.
How can we analyze what we don’t know as a data??
This might be one part we can have a hope to have an advantage over AI. Let’ see…