Volume 43, Issue 2/3, 2015
Special Issue: Sign Evolution on Multiple Time Scales
Jacques Coursil
Pages 226-234
Hidden principles of improvisation
On the basis of the principle of non-premeditation of speech, we argue that the synchronicity of hearing shared by everybody present is incompatible with a division of time between a sender and a receiver of a message. The act of speech brings the participants together in a single moment of perception called a synchronous point. Both the act of speech and music do not appear through time; rather, speech and music create time. The present time of our casual experience always contains a part of radical novelty, probable a posteriori, yet never predicted. Despite our capacity to predict many things and repeat procedures, in the advent of a given moment, the present will always show its uniqueness. Thus, improvisation is based on two principles of uncertainty: the non-premeditated occurrence of speech and the non-predicted part of present time.