How Improvising Musicians "Play What They Hear": A Phenomenology of Sonorous Musical Imagination, Ideation, and Intention in Action

Abstract

When improvising musicians speak of “playing what they hear,” what is unfolding in that moment? This phrase, central to practitioners’ discourse, points to a phenomenon in which creative action is shaped by imagined sonorous ideas within the flow of performance. Yet as Daniel Schmicking (2019) notes, research into this domain faces a “technical problem”: a lack of ethnographic data and a fundamental uncertainty about the very phenomena under investigation. This thesis addresses these gaps through in-depth phenomenological interviews with nine expert improvising double bassists to develop a phenomenology of what I term Sonorous Musical Imagination, Ideation, and Intention in Action (SMIIIA).

Contrary to dominant views in musicology, pedagogy, and cognitive psychology that frame SMIIIA as an internal process culminating in outward expression, my data suggests that SMIIIA emerges from a complex interplay of agency and receptivity between human and non-human factors. Much like a potter working with clay, the improvisers in my study accomplish SMIIIA through world-involving and world-disclosing, public and collaborative processes, enacted with and through bodies, instruments, and musical materials. Drawing primarily on insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Enactivism, and Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory, I here interpret “playing what you hear” as a non-anthropocentric, movement-based form of material engagement—a “dance” of material agency that Malafouris (2014) terms Creative Thinging. Ultimately, my study reveals SMIIIA not as a within property, but, rather, as a between property, arising from a situated, dialogical attunement between musician and world.