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Swinging Mirrors is an interdisciplinary research project developed by the University of Parma and the University of Turin to investigate jazz improvisation as a form of embodied, relational creativity.
When musicians improvise together, they do more than listen to one another: they anticipate, incorporate and transform each other’s musical gestures in real time. The project explores the hypothesis that this creative dialogue may rely, in part, on the mirror mechanism: a fronto-parietal brain network involved in understanding and preparing actions.
To study this process, Swinging Mirrors will use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to transiently perturb cortical hubs of the mirror mechanism during jazz interaction tasks, including call-and-response and ensemble-based improvisation. The resulting musical responses will be examined in terms of melodic and rhythmic relationships, motivic transformation, harmonic coherence, timing, dialogic responsiveness and expert-rated creativity.
The University of Parma unit, coordinated by Dr Arturo Nuara, will contribute expertise in neurophysiology, TMS and experimental design. The University of Turin unit, coordinated by Alessandro Bertinetto, will provide the philosophical and aesthetic framework for interpreting improvisation as shared agency, embodied interaction and creative transformation.
By bringing brain perturbation into the living dynamics of jazz performance, Swinging Mirrors asks a fundamental question: what happens in the brain when another musician’s gesture ceases to be merely perceived and becomes the spark for an original reply? The project opens a new field of dialogue between neuroscience and aesthetics, using improvisation to explore the neural foundations of creativity as an act that emerges between minds, bodies and sounds.
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