The complex plane is your audience.

After reading the first couple chapters of Sync or Swarm, I'm beginning to view improvisation a little differently. The first couple times we played music in class I was nervous about playing out and expressing myself through the music. I'm beginning to become more comfortable with playing and throwing ideas out there even if they're not what I envisioned at that moment. Either I am becoming comfortable with the styles of the people I'm playing with, or I am coming to accept that music doesn't have to be as rigid as a composed piece, that I can take it where I want and it is still music. Though it is probably a mixture of both, I feel that I am gaining a stronger sense of a group dynamic when playing because though my individual contributions at first seem spontaneous and unplanned, I am becoming more aware that I am constantly listening to what everyone else is doing in the moment and continually creating phrases in my head that seem to match the current dynamic.

This is where I feel the connection to the complex analysis course I am taking is strongest and is why I think it's a truly valid connection because it seems so coincidental. Here are these individuals, these points in the complex plane, creating music with their instruments, applying these functions over and over, taking feedback from the initial function and reentering it to create at first seemingly random behavior on the point level, the level of each individual playing. But when viewed from above at the planar level, the level of the audience, there is a boundary created, within which beautiful patterns can arise, much in the same way a song, and with it emotions elicited from the audience, can spring up from seemingly random contributions from each individual member.

It really makes me wonder what sorts of order will arise from apparent disorder. More to come on that later.