Abstract
Musical improvisation seems to require some knowledge and skills for real-time construction of musical structures. Musical harmonies are one of major referents for improvisation in jazz performance. As a cognitive skill for an appropriate recognition of such musical harmonies, we hypothesized that jazz musicians can detect the basic harmonic character of tension harmonies and examined this hypothesis by empirical comparison between jazz musicians and classical musicians. The jazz musicians showed higher scores than the classical musicians in all the discrimination tasks. This result seems to support our hypothesis. It was also suggested that this jazz musiciansʼ cognitive skills are supported by both their knowledge about chord progressions in functional harmonies and a sound corpus of various tension chords characterized according to basic chord character.
