Alumnus Andrew Goldman publishes neurological research about improvisational musicianship

Andrew Goldman (’08), a piano performance and neuroscience alumnus of USC Thornton and USC Dornsife, recently published a research paper, “Improvisation experience predicts how musicians categorize musical structures,” in the Psychology of Music journal. Goldman, who earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge, is currently a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University specializing in music cognition.

In the video above, Goldman and his fellow researchers advance a theory about how improvisational musicians see musical structures in fundamentally different ways than classically-trained musicians. As Goldman notes, “We can do neuroscience experiments that don’t ask how people make up new things, but rather, how their knowledge is organized in such a way that would allow them to quickly respond to a variety of situations.”