Meditation. A keyboad experiment in tempo manipulation

[furtwaengler]

I seem to remember in the days of Derek, he would sometimes speed his improvisations up a bit when sharing certain things, a variable which in my opinion only works well on keyboards (or Busoni piano rolls, haha). So this is a free improvisation controlled in such a way to be manipulated. At least in the case of this one, I found I could not trick myself, i.e. the most effective file is the original, untouched tempo. However, judge for yourself. It's still a worthy experiment. I think it's interesting listening to the difference in tempos conductors choose for a work like Mahler's 7th Symphony...Scherchen in Toronto, a blazing wicked fast pace. Klemperer ot Maazel, extremely slow. In the Scherchen, something of a birds eye view of the first movement, in Maazel so many hidden layers exploding out of the text.

Feel free to chime in with your thoughts however slow or fast.

DSF

[ted]

The effect of speed on the perception of rhythm is a very subtle and complicated matter. Well, it is for me, but of course it could be simple while I am dense. One of the more obvious examples is the syncopation in ragtime. Above a certain critical speed a rag begins to sound like a uniform, albeit rough, stream of notes because the listening mind starts to chunk groups of notes together. Exactly the same thing occurs in classical and unsyncopated music only it is less noticeable. I was discussing this point a couple of weeks ago with the wonderful ragtime pianist and composer, Brian Keenan. We both lament the recent resurgence of what he called a "faster, louder, sillier" mentality in piano playing, particularly ragtime. The early composers, Scott Joplin, James Scott and others, took pains to write "Not fast" on their scores for the good reason that fast playing produces a uniform stream of notes and flattens syncopation.

Even though there is little emphatic syncopation in your piece, a flattening effect is produced as speed increases. I can well understand your preference for the slower example.

I think I shall try the reverse technique with some of the horrendously frenetic passages in my improvisation and slow them down. Now that might well teach me a thing or two.

[caustik]

This is beautiful ..

Can definitely understand the draw toward tempo manipulation. It adds a layer to the usual melody/progression. Btw, normalized your recording and passed it through a limiter to bring it up to a volume level it deserves https://s3.amazonaws.com/caustik.com/Meditation+original+60.mp3

I think to some extent we're both going for the same sort of a goal with improv (but you're about 100x more technically proficient, obviously) https://soundcloud.com/caustik-1/aaron-piano-improv-am-phrygian