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

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.

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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"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!" "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." "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!" "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." "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." "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!" "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!" "Worth noting by British readers is the amount of space devoted to Evan, including some new quotations". 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. With this expanded edition, Borgo presents to us an exquisite, ecological, system-centred view of a profoundly incorporating, embodied musicking practice – improvisation. His journey, deeply influenced by contemporary research in 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended), takes us on a metaphorical Mobius strip that illuminates not only the process and practice, the detritus and debris of musical improvisations, but, that also shows us improvisation as a microcosm of our perception of the world, highlighting the necessity for an open, dynamic, adaptive and emergent collective response to current, pressing social and environmental challenges. David Borgo's original book is already a landmark in improvisation studies. His approach, which seeks to explore improvisation through the lens of several contemporary sciences such as complexity theory, embodied/enactive cognition and actor-network theory, is absolutely original and opens up a field of interdisciplinary studies that has been expanding more and more in recent decades. This new edition brings important updates to the original work, including reflections on electro-acoustic improvisation, cross-cultural improvisation, man-machine interaction, and postcolonial cultural studies. With regard to this last topic, I am sure that my colleagues (improvisors and researchers) in Latin America will be especially pleased.