An international research team investigated the brains of 16 jazz pianists while they played a piece from memory, improvised based on the melody, and freely improvised based on the chord changes. The analysis of how different levels of creative freedom activate specific brain networks revealed that improvisation is more than mere inspiration, as it involves a dynamic reconfiguration of the brain between emotion, technique, and structure.

Creativity is generally defined as the ability to generate ideas or products that are simultaneously new and appropriate to a given context. Despite decades of research, studying creativity in action is still challenging due to its abstract nature and the difficulty of capturing real-time creative processes.

Musical improvisation is seen as an extraordinary manifestation of human creativity. Being both spontaneous and structured, it allows for the observation of how the brain generates real-time novel and relevant ideas. It was precisely this characteristic that led an international team of researchers to investigate the brains of 16 skilled jazz pianists while they were performing the standard “Days of Wine and Roses” under three distinct conditions: playing from memory (byHeart), improvising based on the melody (iMelody), and freely improvising based on the chord changes (iFreely).

In the article Creativity in Music: The Brain Dynamics of Jazz Improvisation, published in September in the scientific journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the researchers explain that they examined how different levels of creative freedom activate specific brain networks, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and the Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis method (which tracks how the brain dynamically reorganises into different substates of networks over time).

With the support of the Bial Foundation, the project was carried out at Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University, Denmark. The team led by Henrique Fernandes (Aarhus University/The Royal Academy of Music), supervised by Peter Vuust, observed that, in the two improvisation conditions, there was increased activation in auditory, motor, and salience networks associated with musical perception, motor execution, and pleasure. In contrast, networks linked to spontaneous thought, reflection, and decision-making, such as the Default Mode Network and the Executive Control Network, were involved differently depending on the level of improvisational freedom. Freer improvisation (iFreely) was marked by increased coactivation of these networks in a distinct substate, possibly supporting complex planning.

“The results revealed that increasing improvisational freedom corresponds to a shift in brain network engagement, from greater involvement of executive and evaluative networks in constrained improvisation to intensified activity in auditory-motor and salience networks during freer forms of creative expression”, says the project coordinator, whose team also includes researchers from ICVS – Life and Health Sciences Research Institute, School of Medicine, University of Minho, Portugal.

By identifying specific substates associated with different levels of creative freedom, this study provides new insights into the brain dynamics underlying musical improvisation, proposing a scalable method for exploring the neural basis of spontaneous creative behaviour.

“These results expand existing models of improvisation by emphasising the dynamic reconfiguration of specific and general networks, also highlighting the importance of interaction between networks over time rather than isolated static activation”, notes Henrique Fernandes.