The evolution of networked audio technologies has created unprecedented opportunities for musicians to improvise with instrumentalists from a diverse range of cultures and disciplines. As network speeds increase and latency is consigned to history, tele-musical collaboration, and in particular improvisation will be shaped by new methodologies that respond to this potential. While networked tech...

Given unexpected incidents on routes of guards that check security objects, like banks, one of the most challenging problems is still how to support improvisation by security personnel in taking decisions to prevent or resolve such incidents. Another as important associated problem is how a security company can naturally take advantage of its existing and novel knowledge about its organizationa...

This paper describes improvisation support for musicians who do not have sufficient improvisational playing experience. The goal of our study is to enable such players to learn the skills necessary for improvisation and to enjoy it. In achieving this goal, we have two objectives: enhancing their skill for instantaneous melody creation and supporting their practice for acquiring this skill. For ...

Embodied design improvisation is a generative and evaluative technique to elicit tacit knowledge about embodied experience. It incorporates storyboarding, Wizard of Oz prototyping, domain expert improvisation, video prototyping and crowdsourced experimentation. We have been developing this technique to design physical interactions with expressive, robotic everyday devices, eliciting the tacit r...

In this paper we explore the concept of safe improvisation and propose principles for design and evaluation of interactive technologies to support improvisational action in safety-critical domains. A particular focus here is on the interactive technologies used in emergency medical services (EMS). In EMS improvisation is necessitated by events, but discouraged within its culture. Designing and ...

We formalize and analyze a new automata-theoretic problem termed control improvisation. Given an automaton, the problem is to produce an improviser, a probabilistic algorithm that randomly generates words in its language, subject to two additional constraints: the satisfaction of an admissibility predicate, and the exhibition of a specified amount of randomness. Control improvisation has multip...

Crisis response is generally acknowledged as a crucial aspect of crisis management. Crisis response often requires a need to improvise because the circumstances demand spontaneous innovation that departs from established procedures. Although previous research has acknowledged improvisation as a valuable component of crisis response, it has not provided adequate conceptual understanding of impro...

The present study explored the associations among several cognitive and creative abilities and expert ratings of jazz improvisational quality. Ten male undergraduate jazz students (8 performance majors, 2 education majors; 5 winds, 3 strings, 1 piano, and 1 drum) performed a video-recorded improvisation with a trio and completed measures of divergent thinking, working memory, and fluid intellig...

Collaborative improvisation, composition, and performance of music constitute a basic and distinctive form of human interaction. Across cultures, the production and enjoyment of music is typically an open, collaborative, activity more analogous to informal conversation or story telling than to a formal lecture. We know very little about how to design for such situations even though we have seen...