The relationship between time constraints and creativity in bass lines of eminent jazz musicians: An exploratory study

The effect of time constraints on the creativity of jazz musicians has received little attention in creativity research and has produced mixed results. In this exploratory study, the relationship between time constraints and creativity was investigated using Kendall’s partial correlation analysis and a sample of forty-two transcriptions of Paul Chambers’s and Ron Carter’s bass lines (9,334 bars of notation in total). Creativity was operationalized as the repetition and entropy of melodic patterns.Both musicians were able to avoid excessive repetition of melodic patterns even at extremely fast tempos. For example, the maximum normalized entropy of 4-note chordal pitch class patterns was 0.902 or greater in both musicians’ original bass lines and bass line reductions (where rhythm and small differences in melody were removed) when tempos were at least 200 beats per minute. When controlling for the length of analyzed bass lines and eliminating the mediating effect of harmonic rhythm, the results usually indicated a statistically non-significant and negligible to weak negative correlation between tempo and the repetition and entropy of melodic patterns in Paul Chambers’s bass line reductions and a statistically non-significant and positive correlation between these variables in Ron Carter’s bass line reductions. In addition, the results indicated that harmonic rhythm (operationalized as the average distance between chord changes) may have a different effect on the repetition and entropy of melodic patterns depending on tempo. This research is one of the first studies to investigate creativity under extreme time constraints.