Listening as a Decentralised Art
(by Rudy Denhoven)
When two musicians meet on stage without a score, what happens in the air between them is something more than sound. Eyes flicker; breath synchronises; the smallest tilt of the body can change the current of a phrase. In that suspended instant, the music doesn’t belong to either player. It belongs to the conversation.
Eugène Feygelson has spent much of his life trying to understand that conversation—not as metaphor, but as method. A violinist and researcher at the Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, he writes about improvisation as though it were a language we once all spoke fluently and have half-forgotten. His doctoral work, Improvisation, Reflexivity, and Nonverbal Communication, reads like a dialogue between a musician’s body and a scientist’s mind. It argues that the truest knowledge of sound doesn’t live in scores or data; it lives in the space between people when they are really listening.
The Listener Inside the Experiment
In most scientific studies, the researcher stands outside the subject. Feygelson steps inside. His thesis begins with a confession: he cannot remove himself from the performances he analyses because he is one of the performers. Rather than pretending detachment, he turns that entanglement into method. Borrowing from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, he calls this a “reflexive” approach—the idea that the observer’s position must be visible within the work.
Watching footage of a small improvising ensemble, Feygelson doesn’t just count gestures or map rhythms; he asks what it felt like from the inside of those movements. How did his bow arm know when to hesitate, when to surge forward? How did another musician’s breath seem to pull his own phrasing into alignment? In the old scientific language of music psychology, such questions might sound unmeasurable. But Feygelson treats them as data—as traces of embodied communication.
His pages are full of diagrams, transcripts, slow-motion frames, and self-commentary. It’s painstaking and oddly intimate, like reading the marginal notes of someone learning how to listen to themselves listen. By placing himself inside the experiment, Feygelson challenges the myth of objectivity that still shadows much of academia. “There is no way to disentangle my own presence from the material,” he writes. The admission is not an apology; it’s a declaration of method. Reflexivity, in his hands, becomes an ethics of awareness.
Improvisation as a Mother Tongue
For Feygelson, improvisation is not a specialised art form but a return to something prehistoric and human. He traces its ancestry to what evolutionary theorists call “musilanguage,” the imagined proto-tongue that blurred song, speech, and gesture long before syntax evolved. When we improvise, he suggests, we tap that shared origin—the body communicating before the mind has time to translate.
In ensemble performance, this communication operates through the smallest signals. A flinch of the eyes, a shift of weight, a lifted eyebrow: all become part of the musical grammar. Drawing on the psychologist Paul Ekman’s taxonomy of gesture, Feygelson catalogues these cues like a naturalist watching a murmuration of starlings. His analysis shows that physical synchrony often precedes sonic change—someone leans forward a fraction of a second before the group accelerates. The body, it seems, decides first; the sound follows.
What fascinates him is not only the precision of this coordination but its fragility. Each performer constantly reads and rereads the others, surrendering control in order to maintain coherence. In neuroscientific studies of jazz musicians (Limb & Braun, 2008), the regions of the brain associated with self-monitoring go quiet during improvisation, while those linked to autobiographical expression light up. To play together well, one must partly disappear. Feygelson’s work makes that surrender visible—an act of trust rendered in motion.
Empathy as Structure
If improvisation is language, empathy is its grammar. Feygelson borrows a phrase from psychologist Frederick Seddon: “empathetic creativity.” It describes the way ensemble musicians inhabit one another’s intentions. When a pianist feels where a violinist might breathe, when a drummer shapes the contour of a melodic line before it exists, they are participating in a distributed consciousness. Creativity, here, is not owned but shared.
This idea overturns centuries of Western mythology about genius. The improvising group has no single author; leadership emerges and dissolves in moments. “The ensemble,” Feygelson writes, “is a self-organising system.” In other words, music behaves like weather—patterns forming through interdependence rather than design.
Such decentralisation gives improvisation its ethical charge. To listen well is to allow another’s voice to shape your own. In a time when cultural discourse often rewards domination—the loudest signal, the sharpest take—Feygelson’s musicians model a subtler intelligence: coherence without control. They show how shared attention can replace authority.
The Body Thinking
One of Feygelson’s most original gestures is to treat the body not merely as an instrument but as a thinking organ. The gestures he analyses on video are also his own, and he treats them as sources of cognition. Movement becomes reasoning; muscle memory becomes analysis. This is what philosophers of mind call “embodied cognition,” the notion that perception and thought are distributed across the body rather than confined to the brain. For a violinist, a phrase may begin in the shoulder before it ever becomes sound.
Feygelson’s commitment to this bodily knowledge leads him to an unusual transparency. He publishes his full data sets—videos, gesture maps, annotated scores—so that readers can verify or dispute his findings. It’s a musician’s version of open science, transforming performance into a public experiment in understanding. The act itself becomes a kind of performance, an invitation to witness listening as research.
The Politics of Hearing
Behind Feygelson’s technical detail runs a quiet social critique. He notes how histories of improvisation often erase their origins in Black musical innovation, reframing jazz through Eurocentric notions of freedom while ignoring its cultural roots. He also recognises how gendered assumptions persist within performance—the leader coded as masculine, the responsive listener as feminine. Against these hierarchies, he finds inspiration in the late composer Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practice sought to democratise sound by extending attention equally to self, other, and environment.
For Feygelson, listening is political because it reorganises power. Who gets to speak—or play—depends on who gets heard. By making listening his central method, he proposes an ethics that begins with attention: a refusal to dominate the sound field. This ethos aligns him, consciously or not, with a wider generation of artists and researchers exploring resonance, consciousness, and collective intelligence as social practice. Where others speak of decentralisation in digital or economic terms, Feygelson finds its prototype in the improvising ensemble.
The Sound of Knowing
What emerges from his research is a new model of knowledge itself. Improvisation, he suggests, can teach us how to think together. Its form mirrors the dynamics of conversation, ecology, even governance—systems where multiple agents coordinate without central command. In this sense, music becomes a laboratory for empathy. The ability to stay responsive within uncertainty, to trust the evolving pattern, may be one of the most necessary skills of our time.
Feygelson calls this a “dialectics of listening”: a movement between self and world, perception and reflection. It’s an idea as relevant to public discourse as to performance. When political debate hardens into noise, when social media turns attention into competition, the improviser’s art of responsive silence offers another model. Listening becomes an act of resistance—a way to remain porous to complexity.
A Philosophy You Can Hear
There is something quietly radical about treating sound as thought. Feygelson’s writing suggests that philosophy might begin not in argument but in vibration, in the way bodies negotiate proximity. His analysis of bow strokes and glances is also a meditation on how meaning arises anywhere: not from assertion, but from relation.
At the heart of his work is a simple proposition—knowledge is what happens between us. Every performance, every conversation, every shared moment of uncertainty becomes a small rehearsal for that truth. In this light, the improviser is less a virtuoso than a citizen of attention, practising a politics of empathy in real time.
When asked in an interview what he listens for when he plays, Feygelson paused for a long time. “I listen,” he said finally, “for the moment when I no longer know who is leading.” That disappearance, the dissolving of self into relation, is his measure of success.
It is tempting to think of this as mysticism, but it’s also a kind of realism—a recognition that all thinking is collective, all sound relational. Feygelson’s research offers a vocabulary for something most of us experience instinctively: that to listen deeply is to become briefly part of a larger mind.
Coda
Imagine, then, the next time you hear two musicians improvising—a conversation in bowed strings or breath and reed. What you are hearing is not performance in the theatrical sense but a form of cognition. It is what intelligence sounds like when it is shared: a network of impulses learning itself through resonance.
In an age obsessed with algorithms and artificial intelligence, Feygelson reminds us that the oldest algorithm is still the human body listening to another. The code is empathy; the interface is air.
Perhaps that is the quiet lesson behind his Cambridge research. Listening, properly understood, is not passive. It is a decentralised art—the work of tuning our individual frequencies to a collective rhythm, of finding coherence without a conductor. It is the sound, faint but persistent, of minds learning how to think together.