Re-mix improvisation.

[lontano]

As I mentioned in a previous post I don't currently have digital access to the few improvisations I still have on tape. However I have done a few experimental improvs using Goldwave software, using pre-recorded CD performances. I seem to have lost most of the work I did over the past decade, but there are a few I'd like to share.

Remember, these aren't my performances, and it's all a bit of fun, so don't be too harsh in you're criticism, and if it is determined that these are inappropriate for this board, please let me know. (I don't have many.)

This one is a familiar Chopin prelude made slightly more "Godowskyesque"  through direct overlay.

[Derek]

Part of me wants to be all liberal and say: Who am I to declare what an improvisation is? and am fine with your posting this here. Yet it seems to me that at the very least, it should involve some kind of creation on your part besides hitting "mix paste" in a program with performances by someone else    interesting idea, but I'm not sure it belongs here or not.    If you had taken a chopin prelude and overlaid perhaps your own improvisation, I think that would belong here. There's got to be something "your own" I think. That's the minimum requirement. Doesn't matter if its one note hit three hundred times. If its your own music (or at least partially your own music) and it is more or less spontaneous, then it is an improvisation.

Improvisation - An approach to making music where one or more musicians physically use one or more musical instruments of any kind to produce their own own music extemporaneously at least partially if not entirely.  

That's how I'd define it..

[lontano]

I fully understand your point. While I believe what I have done both in a recording lab and in Goldwave is a form of creative expression, yet not quite composition nor improvisation, some very startling, fascinating things can arise. And as this is a piano-specific forum, many of the re-mixes I've made go far beyond solo piano, and obviously don't belong here.

Unfortunately I seem to have lost all but a very few examples, and not very good ones at that, so I don't believe I'll be posting any more of these. When/if I manage to transfer my actual piano improvs to digital format I'll post them, but for now I'll just sit back and listen to the work of the rest of you variously talented musicians.

Lontano

[Derek]

I should also add (as you did) that since this is a piano board, presumably our definition of improvisation would include: "Where at least one of the instruments used is a piano" or perhaps "prominently featuring a piano." ...which, your recording does. Just wanted to add this for other visitors perhaps

I was also thinking perhaps one could consider a computer a musical instrument, and one of the sounds a computer can make is an entire chopin prelude. Thus you could perhaps be said to be "performing" when you put together one of these re-mixes. But that is a bit of a stretch...hence why I thought if you put your improv against a chopin prelude, it would contain "your own" extemporaneous playing.  I think the idea is an interesting one though. I imagine if you put in two totally different pieces that in many cases what you get is a din...or do you always use the same piece as an offset?