I wish I were your age again, chopinatic, as I would save myself twenty years of unnecessary work. It took me that long to find there exists a range of other mental states, very conducive to improvisational flow, but too complicated to be labelled "emotion". There is a tendency for improvisers, if they discuss their art at all, which sadly isn't very often other than to further inflate their already ballooning egos, to talk in terms of "what" rather than "how". (Bill Harris excepted, he was different) Interminably learned discussions ensue about the "what", particularly harmony for some odd reason I cannot fathom, but very seldom are aspects such as phrasal, physical and rhythmic generators mentioned. Equally lacking is any indication by accomplished improvisers about exactly how they map their musical and physical vocabulary onto the psyche to form a total yoga over a lifetime.
Yet these processes are just about everything, not whether we follow one certain chord by another, which in a very real sense is appallingly trivial. In fact the fashionable tendency to regard improvisation, and for that matter most of classical and jazz, as a succession of discrete chord blocks seems to me a horribly restrictive idea singularly destructive of real creation.
The thing is that the objective "exploration" you talk about does not destroy or even reduce any concomitant emotion. You will find that doesn't happen. Lots of people harbour this fear, that thinking coldly about one's direction will somehow exclude emotion and "inspiration". It doesn't. The two are perfectly compatible, orthogonal, and indeed necessary ingredients. Put it this way - try reversing the process - everyone knows about having an emotion and placing musical sound on it. Equally valid, but hardly mentioned, is creating a musical sound and allowing the brain to place image, association and emotional reaction on it. This sounds simplistic but once you can do it, once the knack is acquired, the gates of spontaneity are well and truly thrown open.
So I think you are right to pursue this combined approach. I didn't really "get" the objective part until I was in my mid-fifties. Everything I created earlier was more or less founded on emotional impulse or emotion recollected in tranquillity. There was nothing wrong with my playing or its products but the method did restrict me to two or three idioms. To use a metaphorical fancy, my improvisational landscape was restricted to wandering among three or four villages.
Anyway, the specific aspects which I find powerful in this piece are firstly the clearly voiced, definite phrases, secondly the asynchronous interplay between the hands and thirdly the non-uniform distribution of accents leading to a perceived counterpoint; an illusion to be sure, but what isn't illusion in music ? It's a bit like gently impassioned speech articulated in notes. 0:56 to 1:00 is a particularly magical utterance.
Topic: One Wish improvisation