Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition: Improvising Music in a Complex Age

Author:   Professor or Dr. David Borgo (Professor of Music, University of California, San Diego, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Edition:   2nd edition
ISBN:  

9781501368844


Pages:   320
Publication Date:   24 February 2022
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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Sync or Swarm, Revised Edition: Improvising Music in a Complex Age


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Overview

The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the revised edition features new sections that highlight electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Professor or Dr. David Borgo (Professor of Music, University of California, San Diego, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Edition:   2nd edition
ISBN:  

9781501368844


ISBN 10:   1501368842
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   24 February 2022
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface Preface (first edition) 1. The Sound and Science of Surprise The Age of Complexity Sync or Swarm 2. The Study of Improvisation The Field of Improvisation Studies Referent-Based Improvisation Referent-Free Improvisation Freedom Music Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t Improvisation Is, Improvisation Isn’t A Marvel of Paradox 3. Strange Loops The Embodied Mind Enaction and Prediction Taking the Note for a Walk It’s a Bit Like Juggling Lived Body and Living Body On Repeat Fractal Correlation Circular Causality Hall of Mirrors 4. Rivers of Consciousness The Art of the Trio Complexity and Emergence Musical Elephants The Sound of One Note Clapping Time and the Qualia of Experience The Phase Space of Improvisation Attractors Hues of Melanin Fractal Correlation Flights and Perchings 5. Orderly Disorder Chaotics Complex Adaptive Systems Dissipative Structuring Ancient to Future Sketches of Another Future 6. Sync and Swarm The Science of Sync Entrainment A Coordination Problem Insect Music The Art of Improvisation in the Age of Computational Participation The Puzzle of Coaction A Web Without a Spider Reassembling the Social 7. Harnessing Complexity The Map is Not the Territory Situated Musicianship Group Creativity Yes, and… Comprovisation The Shores of Multiplicity Complementarity and Metastability References Index

Reviews

I am pleased to have had my work subjected to such rigorous scrutiny and I appreciate all the thinking David Borgo has done in an area where it is almost impossible to make any single uncontested statement! -- Evan Parker, saxophonist/improvisor/composer Integrating a broad range of interdisciplinary considerations - from complex systems and sociological theories to cognition and consciousness - saxophonist/composer/scholar David Borgo's Sync or Swarm makes important contributions to the expanding dialogue about contemporary improvised music. -- Ed Sarath, Professor of Music and Chair, Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation; Director, Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Getting excited while you are READING about MUSIC may be common to ethno-musicologists. But for me (a cognitive and computer scientist), music generally lives in one part of my brain while scientific/academic work lives in another. David Borgo's Sync or Swarm successfully lights up both sides of my brain! -- Richard K. Belew, Professor and Chair, Cognitive Science Department, University of California, San Diego Not only is this an important book for specialists working in areas of both contemporary music and contemporary science, but it also offers absorbing reading to improvising musicians, their listeners, and the growing cadre of smart, engaged folks fascinated by the human implications of 'complex' music, chaos theory, and other once-foreboding realms. -- David Ake, Associate Professor of Music, University of Nevada, Reno; author of Jazz Cultures Borgo is familiar with a wide range of the recent literature on complexity, chaos, embodiment, etc. and he's done a creative job of bringing that into his main topic: free-jazz group improvisation. -- R. Keith Sawyer, Associate Professor of Education, Washington University; author of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation David Borgo's Sync or Swarm, a provocative, gutsy, and potentially revolutionary attempt to apply chaos theory, fractal plotting, sociological Actor-Network Theory, the concept of swarm intelligence, and other analytical templates to improvised music, wow! -- Christopher Delaurenti, The Stranger a provocative, gutsy, and potentially revolutionary attempt to apply chaos theory, fractal plotting, sociological Actor-Network Theory, the concept of swarm intelligence, and other analytical templates to improvised music. Wow! * The Stranger * Worth noting by British readers is the amount of space devoted to Evan, including some new quotations . -- Brian Priestly, Jazzwise This new edition of Borgo's Sync or Swarm is a most welcome addition to the growing literature emerging out of the new field of Improvisational Studies. Borgo's great strength is to point us toward emerging methods and theories that can both help us understand improvisation in all its complexity, and the ways improvisation itself can help make sense of complex and dynamic social and cultural practices. Here in Sync or Swarm, Black diasporic art is shown to be at the forefront not just of creative practices, but of scientific ones too. It is refreshing to see Black art taken seriously as both a test-case for new theories in cognition, group behavior and complex systems, and as a way of enacting such theories. If you want to see where main-stream research in improvisational studies is likely to be a decade from now, read this new edition of Sync or Swarm. -- Eric Lewis, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and co-editor Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017)


Author Information

David Borgo is Professor and Chair of Music at UC San Diego, USA. He has performed around the world, released 13 albums, and published extensively in scholarly and other outlets. The first edition of Sync or Swarm (Bloomsbury 2005) won the Alan P. Merriam Prize in 2006, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s most distinguished award.

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