ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impact of the audience on a musical event as it unfolds, through qualitative analysis of a formal discussion between practitioners and music psychologists preceded by a musical performance. It begins by considering the previous evening's performance before moving on to a broader discussion of the contexts of musical improvisation. The theoretical context the authors adopt is drawn from ecological psychology, considered broadly as the study of behavior as a mutual outcome of interactions between organisms and environments. The relationships and interactions between musicians are important within any performance context, but arguably these are magnified within an improvisational context. Creative music-making transforms spaces for an audience: but the audience itself is part of the space to be transformed, a source of affordance and constraint, a target for transformation. It is an error to portray creative music-making as the one-way transmission of information to an audience.
