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Musical improvisation is, to many in the Western world, an activity shrouded in mystery. Most listeners are familiar with some genres of music in which improvisation is a commonplace, such as rock and other popular styles, jazz, or perhaps ‘ethnic’musics—that is to say, composed or improvised ‘traditional’musics falling outside the typical Western canons. Therefore listeners are aware that many musicians can, and routinely do, produce novel musical utterances in real time. The question for most listeners is not ‘Can music be improvised?’but rather ‘How is improvisation carried out?’With this formulation of the question, musical improvisation becomes a suitable topic for psychological investigation, focusing on cognitive, physical, and interpersonal processes, and on the musical structures on which these processes operate. Viewed in this way, there are parallels that can be seen with regard to processes of verbal production. No one would think it unusual to find native speakers of a language producing new utterances on the spur of the moment; indeed, to find someone without such an ability is the unusual case (as pointed out in Blacking [1976]).

This chapter seeks to bring together the literature on musical improvisation which will be of interest and benefit to those wishing to know more about it from a cognitive perspective. There is currently a modest but growing literature dealing with the psychology of musical improvisation; the curious might compare the number of articles cited herein with those in other chapters of this volume. One major strand of the music–psychological literature will not be dealt with here, namely the use of improvisation