Welcome to Lost HEMA Theory!

Among other things, the Bad Plus are renowned for taking known musical structures (songs, chordal progressions, etc.) and turning them on the inside-out  of our ears and minds.  Findings within the burgeoning ‘neuroscience of music’ field shed light on why their performances are simultaneously challenging and gratifying, often at different times throughout the course of each performance.  The known musical structures (cognitively-held schemata) our brains bring to and access during each new listening experience enable us to grammatically predict where and when the ongoing musical performance will head, as it emerges in and across the space of time. ²

One of the giants in creativity research—Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi— documented how creative acts accomplished by a myriad of artists involve a ‘flow’ experience during which alpha and beta brainwave activity decreases and theta wave activity increases.  And yes, there are theta wave downloadable files now available on the internet, supposedly helping ‘tune’ our brains to levels of higher theta wave activity, thereby stimulating flow-based creativity. ³  

While the ‘flow’ model for creativity is a comparatively ‘mindless’ approach involving decreased alpha and beta waves, with left-brain rational/analytical thinking taking the backstage as creative/intuitive/pattern-making right-brain activity moves into the foreground, a second approach— Ellen Langer’s ‘mindfulness’ model— focuses on pattern-making, problem-solving creative activity stimulated not by flow states following expected grammatical (music structural) patterns, but instead stimulated by disruptions of our projective expectations of what will be happening when, in the present and foreseeable future of the ongoing musical performance.   Indeed, one study showed how using a flawed, hard-to-read font when presenting people with a word problem significantly improved the correct response rate by breaking study participants out of a more efficient task-enacting state, ramping  up their mindfulness through inserting obstacles and disrupting their ‘automatic’ puzzle-solving routines, leading them to more mindfully consider and respond to the task at hand. ⁴

So from a ‘neuroscience of music’ perspective, the Bad Plus in general— and their ‘Physical Cities’ performance in particular— enact the second more mindful form of creative brain-based activity as noted above;  the band is stimulating Langerian mindfulness through playing with the grammatical stores of known musical structures we bring to each listening session, disrupting our ‘mindless’ expectations regarding where and when things are headed in the performance, but doing so in a grammatical yet novel manner, i.e., their variations on the known musical structures (songs, chordal progressions, etc.) are not what we expect but are nonetheless subject to a coherent grammaticality, and it is this deeper unexpected pattern that they invite us to experience and apprehend during the course of each song they make mindful.  While all jazz improvisation involves some degree of inventive variations on known musical structures, the Bad Plus take this to exponentially higher levels through more pronounced, frequent, and unexpected variations in all aspects, including time, tempo, chordal progressions, etc. ⁵ 

So what is the pattern in the Physical Cities clip available at the Youtube link below?  From the larger metaperspective, this clip is yet another memetic stimulus— a mindfully-disruptive musical mental virus— the Bad Plus have inserted into the broader community of music aficionados, infecting us out of our Walking Dead mindless musical consumptiveness, with the urge to solve the deeper pattern our brains are telling us is there…  and must be there…..  And while we marvel at the band’s ability to synchronize along a beat apparently arising from some arcane random number generator, our infected mindfulness compels us to search for hidden patterns in the enacted beat…  One common mindful first-take is that it sounds like morse code, and when infected by this memetic urge we may be compelled to log online and search for transcribed documentations of the beat, comparing the transcriptions with morse code tables, attempting to link beat patterns to letters of the alphabet and words, with rests between beats potentially demarcating the words. 

We learn there are at least three different forms of morse code— American, Continental, and International— and now work to discern the presence of an alphabetical or alphanumerical message out of the beats.  Next, we move to consider the possibility that the spaces between the beats— negative space— is another source of information, above and beyond the notes/beats themselves.  Finally, we consult tables containing binary codes, hexadecimal codes, and more….  Identifying the set of coded letters and using an online program to explore different potentially meaningful letter combinations, we arrive at....    M-A-N-U-E-L   C-A-S-T-E-L-L-S…  one of the top five-most-often-cited social scientists of the current era, whose ground-breaking research helped move our understanding of communities from the 20^th to the 21^st Century, through outlining the ongoing movement from Physical Cities to Digital Cities, unpacking a range of valuable insights along the way. ⁶  

And finally, when all is said and done, decades of research on literary criticism (deconstruction, hermeneutics, etc.) and IQ testing has reinforced the notion that there are more patterns underlying a given stimulus set (creative act/product) than what may have been intended by the authors.  Indeed, the use of Number Sequence problems in IQ tests has been called into serious question by research showing that algorithms can be generated to prove a range of different ‘correct’ responses, above and beyond the particular response the test maker intends as the correct one. ⁷

So is the answer the question itself?  Is the so-called 'hidden pattern' in reality the very act and process of the Bad Plus infecting listeners with a memetic virus of enhanced mindfulness, jolting us gratefully out of our Walking Deadfulness, stimulating ongoing heuristic puzzle-solving activity in a manner not unlike the ambiguous and intriguing ‘Easter eggs’ implanted by producers and writers into that famed television series, Lost?  Or is there one true, real, embedded ‘official’ hidden pattern intended in an authorial fashion by the Bad Plus, still lying in wait for us all to discern?  Even if this is so, the band has already succeeded in infecting us with the desire to question and puzzle and search for latent patterns in this richly complex and mindful performance.

What do you think is the hidden pattern….? ⁸

Dr. Todd J. Hostager

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ENDNOTES:

1.  Below is a sample of sites noting and wondering about the intriguing 'morse code' pattern embedded within the Bad Plus "Physical Cities" track:

http://secretsociety.typepad.com/darcy_james_argues_secret/2008/06/the-bad-plus-1.html

http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2008/07/bad-plus-physic.html

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Bad+Plus/_/Physical+Cities

http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddentrack/good-goes-the-bad-plus/

2.  For more information on the fascinating 'neuroscience of music' field, please see:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-neuroscience-of-music/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_neuroscience_of_music

http://neurosciencenews.com/neuroscience-music-enchances-learning-neuroplasticity/

http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Neuroscience-Music-Isabelle-Peretz/dp/0198525206

3.  Information on the 'theta wave'/creativity link, plus online 'theta-wave' generators:

http://www.brainwavesblog.com/tag/theta-waves/

http://www.binauralbeatsgeek.com/theta-brain-waves.html

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brainwaves-Generator-Free-Software-Download/205382089520256?sk=info

4.  For more information on Dr. Shane Frederick's fascinating study, see:

http://whywereason.wordpress.com/tag/shane-frederick/

5.  Since 1987, I've been involved in the study of Jazz as a literal model for creative improvisation in groups and organizations in business and beyond.  Our studies involve a multimethod approach to teasing out key aspects of how experts enact creative improvisation in a social context.  We study both the contents and the processes involved in improvisation by videotaping fully improvised group jazz performances, i.e., sessions in which the players have not played or rehearsed with each other prior to the performance, and the performance occurs without the use of sheet music.  This approach yields a fully improvised creative soclal performance, and by carefully tracking and deconstructing the substantive (content) and processual details of who did what, and when and why, watching and rewatching the videotaped data record on a moment-to-moment basis, with one or more of the performers present, we succeeded in unpacking key aspects of improvised social creativity. 

Improvisation is neither totally structured nor is it totally unstructured:  It is semi-structured, yielding sensible, grammatical, aesthetically-pleasing outcomes that build on prior songs and performances, while at the same time manifesting truly new sets of musical ideas.  On this view, the Lost Creative Combine's admission that some aspects of the show were improvised is to be expected and is a natural part of any collaborative creative effort, especially one that plays out within the confines of a prespecified narrative macrostructure, over the course of multiple years.  They knew the substantive arc of their 'performance' in creating the Lost narrative, and they knew how this 'performance' would end, but while involved in playing each song (writing each episode), inevitably they inventively tried some new narrative 'riffs' on established themes out, with some succeeding and others famously flopping (think Paulo and Nikki!)

Here are the references for our key seminal publications on group jazz improvisation as a paradigm for group and organizational innovation:

Bastien, D.T., & Hostager, T.J.  (1988).  Jazz as a process of organizational

     innovation. Special Issue: Innovative Research on Innovation and Organizations (Everett M.

     Rogers & Andrew H. Van de Ven, eds.), Communication Research, 15:

     582‑602.

Bastien, D.T., & Hostager, T.J.  (1992).  Cooperation as communicative

     accomplishment: A symbolic interaction analysis of an improvised jazz concert. 

     Communication Studies, 43: 92‑104.

     research annual (Vol. 15, pp. 203‑219).  Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

More recently, we have applied the multimethod approach for unpacking expertise to study differences in how expert entrepreneurs and novices perceive and interpret new venture idea proposals.

6.  Spanning more than 30 years, Manuel Castells' pioneering research has paved the way for our understanding of the ongoing shift from Physical Cities to Digital Cities, and the intriguing implications thereof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Castells

7.  For more information on the nature of the debates regarding authorial intent, please see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent

Mitchell, W.J.T. (Ed.)  (1985).  Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norris, C. (1982).  Deconstruction: Theory & Practice.  New York: Methuen.

8.  ....and here's the Youtube clip containing the sequence in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5vuYj2vjRY