Premium
Trading fours: Creativity, analogy, and exchange
Author(s) -
BRENNEIS DON
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12042
Subject(s) - analogy , jazz , creativity , sociology , affordance , divination , epistemology , focus (optics) , contest , improvisation , ethnography , composition (language) , intentionality , aesthetics , cognitive science , linguistics , anthropology , literature , visual arts , psychology , philosophy , art , social psychology , cognitive psychology , physics , theology , optics
In commenting on Eitan Wilf's “Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination,” I consider contemporary practices of spontaneous algorithmic composition designed to help produce new, unpredictable, and “interesting” jazz music. I focus, in particular, on five themes that emerge in Wilf's article: emotion, grooves and grooving, routinization, affordances and constraints, and analogy as both cultural practice and theory‐making strategy. I also draw on a comparison between the emergent compositional practices Wilf documents and ethnographic accounts of other improvisatory practices in jazz.