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Impro-Visor Changelog

What's new in Impro-Visor 10

Jul 23, 2018
  • The Transposition Wizard has been included. This replaces the old playback
  • transposition spinner that effects bass and chord parts only. The new feature
  • allows one-time transposition of any or all parts, as well as playback
  • adjustment of any part.
  • Active and passive trading controls have been merged into a single dialog.
  • Improv controls and settings have been moved from the Utilities menu to the
  • Improv menu.
  • Several new and more interesting comping styles that are sub-styles of swing
  • have been added, such as Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, etc. To
  • accommodate these, the style mechanism has been changed so that patterns can
  • be truncated without having the need to provide short versions of the pattern.
  • Consequently, fewer chord patterns are needed in general. If the old patterns
  • are used, the algorithm may generate too many comping hits.
  • Grammar learning now includes a facility for motifs and their exploitation in
  • improvisation.
  • There is a mode within Active Trading intended to provide practice with
  • learning rhythms. A better description of how to use will be forthcoming.
  • There is a checkbox to save the roadmap whenever a leadsheet is saved. This
  • roadmap is represented in S expression form and is primarily of interest to
  • certain developers and researchers at present. The first 20 or so roadmaps
  • in the Imaginary Book have already been saved.
  • Various bugs were fixed, including one in the Style Editor.
  • Auto-scroll now works with improvisation. (Thanks to Evelina Gkougklia for
  • identifying the fix.)
  • After printing, the cursor now returns to its proper form.
  • MIDI export works if style is set to no-style.

New in Impro-Visor 9.1 (Jun 19, 2017)

  • A new Advice tab is added called Rhythms. This provides an assortment of rhythms for entry into a leadsheet. The rhythms can be given pitches, or left as a single pitch, corresponding to the root of the chord.
  • A report is generated for a chorus as to how many red notes there are, and the amount of space occupied by them in the chorus overall.
  • A bug reported with roadmaps that start blank and have chords added to them not playing.
  • The imaginary book and various other leadsheets is now included in release.

New in Impro-Visor 9.01 (Jun 19, 2017)

  • This release provides a bug work-around.
  • In recent versions, pasting a chord, then undoing caused 120 slots to appear, the app would freeze, and the leadsheet contents would be lost. I just identified the trigger of the problem, but the fix seems complicated, so better to do without the undo of pasting of a chord for now than to suffer a catastrophic loss.
  • A pasted chord can still be cut, but to return to a chord over which pasting occurs will require re-entering the latter chord.

New in Impro-Visor 9.0 (Jun 19, 2017)

  • This release adds improvisation using deep learning, in the form of a recurrent LSTM (long short-term memory) neural network.
  • This form of learning is captured using a "connectome" (.ctome) file, of which several examples are in the connectomes directory.
  • Unlike grammar learning, which is self-contained in Impro-Visor, the learning of a connectome is done by a separate Python program that may be found in the github repository. Also, learning takes quite a bit longer than for grammars.
  • A paper describing our approach will appear in the International Conference on Computational Creativity, June 2017, entitled "Learning to Create Jazz Using a Product of Experts", by Daniel Johnson, Robert M. Keller, and Nicholas Weintraut. Also added is a chord voicing visualizer on a grand staff. This is a partial port from a former stand-alone app called "Visichord", which was a software development class project constructed by Adrian Mettler, Gabriel Neer, Erika Rice Sherpelz, and Jeffrey Sherpelz. There are a few changes in the user interface.

New in Impro-Visor 8.11 (Jun 1, 2016)

  • This release fixes a bug in Active Improvisation, namely that the main window controls become disabled if the Active Improvisation window is opened more than once. It also adds a MIDI setting to correct for input delay in the case that the audio Pitch Tracker is being used to convert audio to MIDI.

New in Impro-Visor 8.1 (May 25, 2016)

  • The newest feature is Active Improvisation, in which Impro-Visor will react to what the user plays on a MIDI instrument, such as a keyboard. Still present is Passive Trading, which was formerly available. Now there are some new forms of passive improvisation:
  • Division: Which sub-divides the interval between successive notes of a generated line, in some cases multiple times (as set by the Division control panel).
  • One way to get a line for Division is to use Guide Tones, and there is now a facility for generating them.
  • Guide Tone and Transform: Which applies a transform from a Transformational Grammar to a guide tone line.
  • Interval Learning:
  • which generates based on a Markov Chain derived from statistics taken from a solo. Theme Weaving: which reuses one or more themes specified by the user among lines generated by a Grammar. There is a new Fluid Voicing Editor for generating piano-oriented chord voicings based on parameters settable by the user. There is now a range filter for midi input, so that, for example one could play the left-hand on a piano and have only the right-hand notes entered (assuming they are in the specified range). Starting note can be displayed in the roadmap if melody is present in the leadsheet. Also styles can be displayed on the roadmap (in case a tune has multiple styles).
  • Bugs fixed include:
  • Certain types of bricks no longer get mangled in the roadmap preview.
  • Voicing keyboard no longer fails to display certain voicings during playback.
  • The number of widgets in the main window has been reduced for a simplified interface.
  • The functionality of removed widgets is available through other menus, such as the View menu.

New in Impro-Visor 7.0 (Jun 3, 2015)

  • There is a new grammar learning method based on relative pitches.
  • There is new solo generation method based on transformations from a basic melody.
  • Trading can now be done with any grammar, not just ones designated for trading.
  • The former Solo Generator has been enhanced to become the Theme Weaver.
  • There is still a bit of work to be done on it.
  • There is a menu for quantize a melody to a specified number of sub-divisions of a beat.
  • This can be used to clean up melodies that are played by a human in real-time on a MIDI instrument.
  • There are some new elements, such as arpeggiation, in the style pattern editor. Individual style patterns (rather than just whole styles) can be named and included by reference rather than by literally copying them.
  • The section sub-divider interface has been changed slightly.

New in Impro-Visor 6.0 (Jun 17, 2014)

  • Now the pitch of the note is displayed to the left of the arrow-head note
  • cursor. This may be turned off in the View menu.
  • There is an alternate cursor in the shape of note head. The note head will
  • have a line through it if the note is on a line, and no line if the note is
  • on a space.
  • The Style/Section editor has been changed to allow greater flexiblity.
  • Sections may be added and removed on the staff by using a shift-click.
  • There is an option in the View menu to display Major 7 chords using a delta,
  • and minor 7 flat 5 chords using a phi symbol, as is done in some leadsheets
  • such as Aebersold and the Real Book.
  • There is a virtual keyboard for entering notes on the screen. It has an
  • advising option that indicates whether a note is a chord tone or color tone,
  • as well as some other options. This is opened as Advising Keyboard from the
  • Utilities menu or with control-shift-K.
  • There is now an option within Import MIDI Tracks from File to infer chords.
  • Now the Style Extractor does not require a leadsheet file to specify chords;
  • extraction is done only form MIDI files. There are some added styles that were
  • extracted from MIDI files generated by ChordPulse.
  • The grammar formalism contains some new constructs, including the ability
  • to specify relative pitches (rather than just abstract notes), and other
  • built-ins, such as for generating George Garzone's triadic melodies. There
  • is also a grammar for Jerry Bergonzi's method of improvisation, described in
  • his book Melodic Structures.
  • Now a new leadsheet can be constructed from a roadmap.
  • The roadmap analysis algorithm has been changed to use harmonic tempo.
  • Now the Improv button will start improvisation over the selection and loop
  • continuously, until the button is toggled off.
  • There is a **preliminary** facility for audio input, however it requires
  • co-installation of SuperCollider with the Tartini plug-in. Audio is converted
  • to MIDI, which Impro-Visor can input in real-time.

New in Impro-Visor 5.16 (May 15, 2012)

  • Improves MIDI recording, allowing resolution to be set. MIDI recording can now be done in conjunction with improvisation.
  • Memory leakage during recording is greatly reduced.
  • Re-organizes grammars for trading, in the form trade-4-A-chord, etc. Here 4 is the number of bars traded, A means the computer goes first, B means the user goes first. 'chord' means that tones are constrainted to chord tones and approach tones. 'color' means that color tones and scale tones are also used.
  • The layout of the main window is changed slightly for better ergonomics.

New in Impro-Visor 5.15 (May 2, 2012)

  • Improves handling of MIDI track importing.
  • Improves style extraction from MIDI capabilities.

New in Impro-Visor 5.14 PreRelease (Apr 17, 2012)

  • Bug fix: Fixes MusicXML export that was broken in 5.12, 5.13.
  • Adds preliminary MIDI file import.
  • Now a MIDI file can be loaded and played as such. Single tracks can be imported as Impro-Visor melodies. (We do not import an entire leadsheet with chord symbols, etc.) Sysex events in the MIDI file are ignored.
  • Improves Style Extraction editor and repairs some long standing problems in that area.
  • Replaces Generate button with Improvise toggle button.
  • Now improvisation will continue until the button is toggled a second time. Playback stop is still through the stop button or the K key.