Building on this philosophical foundation, Feygelson’s second major analytical move is to treat improvisation as a form of nonverbal communication (NVC) grounded in embodiment and empathy. Integrating insights from psychology, neuroscience, and ethology, he demonstrates that improvised musical dialogue is not a metaphor for conversation—it is a mode of communication in its own right, emerging from motor, affective, and social coupling. Together, these two strands—reflexivity and embodied communication—form a dialectical model in which improvisation becomes both a site of knowledge and a model for decentralised, ethical modes of collective intelligence.
1. Introduction
The study of musical improvisation occupies an unusual space between artistic creation and scientific inquiry. Across the past half-century, improvisation has been examined through radically divergent lenses: ethnomusicology, performance studies, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology of art. Yet, as Feygelson (2022) notes, these disciplines often mirror the very divisions that improvisation itself dissolves. On one side, scientific approaches seek to isolate cognitive or perceptual mechanisms; on the other, humanistic and artistic approaches valorise lived experience and creative agency. The result is a persistent epistemological split—between objectivism and subjectivism, data and experience, observation and participation.
Feygelson’s research intervenes precisely at this divide. His project, developed through years of practice-led inquiry as both violinist and researcher, proposes improvisation not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon but as a form of knowledge production. The improvising ensemble, he argues, provides a microcosm of how humans generate meaning together without a centralised plan. Sound, gesture, and attention constitute a network of relations in which cognition is distributed across bodies, instruments, and temporal flow. Improvisation, therefore, is not the expression of pre-formed ideas; it is the emergence of knowledge through interaction.
This epistemological stance situates Feygelson in conversation with thinkers who have sought to dissolve the dualism between subject and object—most notably Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From Bourdieu, Feygelson adopts the notion of reflexive sociology (Bourdieu, 1977), insisting that the researcher’s own position, habitus, and interpretive biases must be rendered visible within the analytic frame. From Merleau-Ponty, he inherits the conviction that perception is not detached observation but embodied participation in the world. These theoretical influences converge in Feygelson’s method: an autoethnography of practice that resists both the disembodied gaze of the scientist and the solipsism of purely subjective introspection.
In his first chapter, Feygelson (2022) argues that to study improvisation rigorously, the researcher must recognise their role not as neutral observer but as participant within the system of communication being analysed. As the performer-analyst, he writes, “there is no way to disentangle my own presence in the thesis material; my vantage point is part of the very thing I study.” This admission does not weaken the research’s validity—it strengthens it, transforming reflexivity from a methodological disclaimer into an epistemological principle.
Feygelson thus joins a growing movement within artistic research that reconceives knowledge as emergent, embodied, and relational. Yet his contribution goes further: he insists on dialectical synthesis. Rather than abandoning the rigor of empirical method, he integrates it within the performative act itself. His analysis employs video microanalysis, co-occurrence coding of gestures and musical cues, and the publication of full datasets, all made available to readers for verification. In doing so, he performs an act of methodological transparency rarely seen in performance-based research.
Improvisation, for Feygelson, is therefore both object and method. It is a dynamic social field where perception, intention, and affect are continually negotiated, and a meta-model for how research itself might proceed—reflexively, collaboratively, and in real time.
2. Reflexivity and the Researcher-Performer
Feygelson’s first major contribution is to reposition reflexivity not as a disclaimer but as a principle of knowledge creation. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), he argues that any claim to objective understanding must account for the researcher’s own social and perceptual position. The act of observation, in other words, is never neutral. Within musical improvisation, where meaning is generated through shared presence, this insight becomes indispensable: to listen, to play, and to interpret are inseparable gestures.
In his self-analysis, Feygelson acknowledges that his dual role as violinist and researcher (“VLN” and “VLN1” in his data notation) blurs the traditional boundary between subject and object. Rather than seeing this as a flaw, he reconfigures it as a dialectical advantage. The reflexive stance allows him to oscillate between first-person phenomenology and third-person analysis—between felt experience and empirical observation. Following Bourdieu, he calls this movement a “dialectical synthesis”: the continual interplay between the objectivist moment (where data are formalised) and the subjectivist moment (where lived temporality re-enters the frame).
Feygelson is acutely aware of what he calls the “detemporalising effect” of conventional objectivism. In traditional empirical reporting, events are frozen into diagrams, their temporal flow removed in order to yield generalisable patterns. But improvisation, he argues, resists this flattening. It is temporal knowledge—knowledge that exists only in unfolding. To understand it, one must analyse it as it happens. This conviction shapes his presentation style: rather than presenting distilled conclusions, he provides detailed audiovisual excerpts and synchronised analytical annotations. His data are not merely cited but performed within the text.
Methodologically, Feygelson situates his work within the framework of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Instead of beginning with a fixed theoretical model, he allows categories to emerge inductively from the material itself. Yet he resists the naïve empiricism sometimes associated with Grounded Theory. He notes that “emergence” is often invoked loosely in qualitative research; in his project, emergence is quantified through systematic co-occurrence analysis of musical and gestural cues. The identification of “significant moments” is not intuitive but algorithmically traceable—a fusion of interpretive and computational rigor.
This commitment to transparency extends to the architecture of his thesis. Feygelson offers open access to his video datasets, gesture codings, and analytic spreadsheets, inviting readers to interrogate and even contest his interpretations. Such openness is not merely an ethical gesture but a form of distributed verification—an analogue, within artistic research, to peer-reviewed reproducibility in the sciences.
Reflexivity, for Feygelson, thus becomes an ethical act. By acknowledging the situatedness of knowledge, he transforms subjectivity from bias into relational accountability. Every interpretive choice becomes a site of negotiation between self and other, perception and representation. This notion of “research as listening” positions his methodology within a lineage that extends from feminist standpoint theory to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening (Oliveros, 2005). Both advocate for awareness of one’s positionality as the foundation of genuine empathy.
In section 1.4.6 of his thesis, Feygelson applies this ethical reflexivity to the social dimensions of improvisation. Citing George Lewis’s (1996) distinction between “Afrological” and “Eurological” improvisatory traditions, he critiques the ways in which race, gender, and class shape not only who gets heard but what forms of expression are valorised. Jazz, for instance, is often absorbed into Eurocentric discourse as an aesthetic form while its African-American epistemologies are marginalised. Feygelson calls for a re-centering of improvisation as situated communication—a dialogue shaped by the embodied histories of its participants.
This recognition of power and perspective also extends to gender. Drawing on Georgina Born (1995), he notes the gendered coding of musical authority, where the improvising “leader” is often implicitly male and the responsive listener feminised. In this light, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening becomes not merely an aesthetic but a feminist intervention: an ethics of attention that redistributes creative agency. For Feygelson, this redistribution is both social and methodological—an early articulation of the “decentralised” ethics of listening that later artistic movements would explore.
3. Improvisation as Nonverbal Communication
If the first half of Feygelson’s thesis establishes the epistemological ground, the second constructs an empirical and theoretical system for understanding improvisation as nonverbal communication (NVC). This section draws from multiple disciplines—ethology, cognitive psychology, and communication studies—to model musical interaction as a communicative ecology.
3.1 The Evolutionary Frame
Feygelson begins by tracing a lineage from Steven Brown’s “musilanguage” hypothesis (2001) and Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals (2005). These models propose that music and language share a common evolutionary origin: a multimodal proto-communication system combining prosody, gesture, and vocalisation. For Feygelson, improvisation represents a living trace of this pre-linguistic communicative capacity. When musicians improvise together, they re-enter this evolutionary layer of social meaning-making—one grounded in bodily synchrony and shared affect rather than symbolic exchange.
This view reframes musical performance as a social-neural phenomenon. Drawing on research by Limb and Braun (2008), who used fMRI to study jazz improvisation, Feygelson emphasises that improvisers exhibit deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (responsible for self-monitoring) alongside activation of medial prefrontal regions linked to autobiographical expression. The brain, in other words, down-regulates conscious control to enable flow. Improvisation thus involves both surrender and attunement: a neurobiological basis for the relational reflexivity described earlier.
3.2 Gesture and the Semiotics of the Body
To operationalise this model, Feygelson integrates Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen’s (1969) taxonomy of gesture—emblems, illustrators, regulators, affect displays, and adaptors—into a musical context. In ensemble improvisation, these bodily cues function as a parallel language: facial expressions regulate timing, posture signals readiness, and micro-movements of the bow or breath coordinate collective phrasing. The ensemble becomes a gestural conversation, where sound and motion are reciprocally encoded.
Feygelson’s analysis employs high-frame-rate video to capture these interactions. Through frame-by-frame coding, he identifies co-occurrences between specific gestures (e.g., eye contact, leaning forward) and musical events (e.g., tempo shifts, dynamic changes). The resulting maps show that nonverbal synchronisation often precedes sonic change—evidence that communication operates beneath conscious awareness. Improvisation, then, is not spontaneous chaos but structured empathy: a real-time negotiation mediated by bodily cues.
3.3 Empathetic Creativity and Social Cognition
The psychological dimension of this model draws on Seddon’s (2005) concept of empathetic creativity, which describes ensemble improvisation as a process of decentring and introspection. Musicians, Seddon argues, engage in reciprocal role-taking—momentarily inhabiting one another’s expressive intentions. Feygelson extends this idea, framing empathy as the cognitive mechanism underlying collective creativity. In improvisation, self and other are dynamically entwined: each performer anticipates, mirrors, and modulates the other’s gestures.
Here Feygelson’s approach resonates with theories of enactive cognition (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), which define perception as active participation rather than passive reception. The improvising ensemble enacts a shared world of sound, co-constituted through mutual responsiveness. The “score” is emergent; the composition is a process, not a product.
3.4 The Ensemble as Self-Organising System
Through this interdisciplinary synthesis, Feygelson models the improvising group as a self-organising system. Leadership emerges fluidly through attention and response rather than fixed hierarchy. Moments of synchrony—what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called flow states—arise when participants achieve high mutual predictability without central control.
This framework parallels contemporary theories of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), which describe knowledge as spread across people and artefacts rather than located within individuals. Instruments, bodies, and gestures form a cognitive network that thinks through sound. The ensemble thus embodies a decentralised intelligence—a social microcosm of collective problem-solving.
3.5 Reflexivity Embodied
Crucially, Feygelson does not treat these empirical findings as detached observation. Instead, he returns to reflexivity at the bodily level: the gestures he analyses are also his own. In acknowledging this, he transforms the body into a site of epistemic reflection. The researcher’s awareness of their own kinaesthetic experience becomes part of the data. Reflexivity, once methodological, now becomes physiological.
Through this integration, Feygelson unites two traditions often kept apart: the cognitive-scientific study of interactionand the phenomenological study of experience. The result is a model that is at once empirically grounded and experientially rich—a form of scientific humanism that refuses to sacrifice complexity for clarity.
4. Toward a Decentralised Ethics of Listening
The cumulative effect of Feygelson’s theoretical and empirical chapters is the emergence of a decentralised model of communication and knowledge—an ethics of listening grounded in reciprocity rather than hierarchy. Across his analyses, improvisation appears not only as a musical form but as a social paradigm: a distributed system in which agency circulates fluidly among participants.
This decentralisation operates at multiple levels. In the musical ensemble, leadership is emergent; coordination arises from mutual responsiveness rather than top-down direction. In research practice, interpretation is co-produced between performer and analyst, subject and observer. Even epistemologically, meaning is treated as interpersonal, located in the dynamic between perspectives rather than within any single authority.
For Feygelson, this redistribution of agency is not merely methodological—it is ethical. To listen deeply is to grant others epistemic space. This ethos resonates with Pauline Oliveros’s (2005) concept of Deep Listening, which advocates cultivating awareness across multiple layers of perception and social relation. In Oliveros’s words, listening “extends beyond the perceptual to the imaginative, to the embodied and the communal.” Feygelson’s dialectical approach performs precisely this extension within academic research, demonstrating that rigorous analysis need not exclude empathy, and that empathy can itself be a form of method.
Moreover, his framework offers a counterpoint to the dominant paradigm of individual creativity in Western art music. Improvisation, in his account, exemplifies collective creativity—an emergent intelligence distributed across bodies and temporal flow. The relational awareness that sustains improvisation mirrors the dynamics of complex systems in nature and society. Each performer functions as an autonomous agent, yet coherence arises spontaneously from their interdependence. This ecological model of sound anticipates broader conversations about systems thinking, emergence, and intersubjectivity now spreading across disciplines from cognitive science to social design.
By integrating these perspectives, Feygelson positions improvisation as a prototype for decentralised social cognition. The ensemble becomes a living metaphor for how humans might organise collectively without rigid hierarchy: through attentiveness, responsiveness, and shared temporal grounding. Listening, in this sense, becomes both method and ethic—a practice of attunement capable of transforming social relations.
This ethical dimension also reframes the politics of research representation. Feygelson’s transparency—his decision to publish data, invite critique, and expose his interpretive process—enacts the same ethos of reciprocity found in his performances. Knowledge, like sound, is co-created through dialogue. Reflexivity thus becomes a social contract rather than a solitary introspection.
5. Conclusion
Eugène Feygelson’s Dialectics of Listening articulates a profoundly integrative vision of musical improvisation—one that unites empirical precision, philosophical reflexivity, and ethical sensitivity. His research at the Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, exemplifies a mature form of artistic inquiry: a practice in which making, observing, and reflecting are inseparable dimensions of the same act.
Through his reflexive methodology, Feygelson dissolves the boundary between researcher and performer, repositioning the self not as detached observer but as participant within a communicative field. Through his empirical analysis, he shows that improvisation functions as a form of nonverbal language—an embodied system of gestures, synchrony, and empathy. And through his synthesis of these two domains, he advances a vision of knowledge as relational and decentralised: an ethics of listening that challenges the hierarchies of both art and science.
In Feygelson’s framework, to improvise is to think together—to enter a shared field of perception where difference becomes dialogue and uncertainty becomes generative. Such a model has implications far beyond music. It suggests that collective intelligence, whether artistic, social, or scientific, depends not on control but on attunement; not on mastery but on reciprocity.
Ultimately, his work invites a reimagining of scholarship itself as a form of listening: a process of co-creation that honours the presence of others in every act of knowing. Within this vision, improvisation is no longer a niche practice or metaphor. It is a mode of being—an ongoing conversation between self and world, sound and silence, analysis and experience.
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