Karl Evangelista's contribution to the special issue, "Improvisation, Musical Communities, and COVID-19 Pandemic."

This article presents JIG, a system for improvisation on jazz ballads. It was described previously in a Master’s Thesis [4]. JIG generates so called ’formulaic’ improvisations. It uses constraints, in combination with probability-driven randomness to generate note-attributes. In this way, numerous different improvisations can be generated on a single song. JIG has been incorporated in SaxEx, a ...

While some motor behavior is instinctive and stereotyped or learned and re-executed, much action is a spontaneous response to a novel set of environmental conditions. The neural correlates of both pre-learned and cued motor sequences have been previously studied, but novel motor behavior has thus far not been examined through brain imaging. In this paper, we report a study of musical improvisat...