Impro-Visor
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| Developer(s) | Robert M. (Bob) Keller and others at Harvey Mudd College and elsewhere |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2006 March |
| Stable release |
8.11 / May 31, 2016
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| Repository | sourceforge |
| Operating system | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Type | Scorewriter |
| License | GPLv2 |
| Website | cs |
Impro-Visor is an educational tool for creating and playing a lead sheet, with a particular orientation toward representing jazz solos.
The philosophy of Impro-Visor is to provide a tool to help musicians construct jazz solos over chord progressions. It includes a database capability for creating, saving, and recalling licks, as well as a lick generation capability based on a user-modifiable grammar. More recent versions of Impro-Visor include auto-generated playback accompaniment in various styles, and a style extraction (from MIDI) capability. Most musical knowledge, including lick generation, database, lead sheets, styles, and other information, is represented as text files, permitting the tool to be customized.
Impro-Visor saves lead sheets in a textual notation, and lead sheets may be created from that notation as well as by point-and-click. The notation was designed to be friendly to the jazz musician, by resembling directly what appears on the lead sheet staff. For example, the lead sheet fragment to the right, similar to that in article lead sheet, can be created by the following text:
C C7 | F |
c+2 bb2 bb8 a8 f2.
The reading of this text is: Chords C and C7 equally spaced in the first bar, and F in the second bar. A melody of c (the + means an octave above middle C, the 2 means a half-note), bb2, meaning a B-flat half-note, bb8, meaning a B-flat eighth-note, f2., meaning an F dotted half-note. Other meta-data can be supplied, such as for style specification, but is not required.
Impro-Visor categorizes tones that can be played over any chord into one of four categories. This serves two purposes: (i) as visual feedback to the user, where each category is rendered as a different color, and (ii) as a basis for lick generation. The categories are:
The idea is that, aided by visual clues, the musician can learn to appreciate the degree to which a melody will be sonorous over a chord progression prior to hearing it.
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Wikipedia