Posted
This evening I martyred Chopin.
The objective was, analogous to the previous post on Brahms, to replace the harmonic progression of the study opus 25 n. 2 by Frederic Chopin with a different progression.
I failed, because the right hand plays very quickly, and the study is then built on a slowly changing harmony: one chord for each measure.
If you attempt to replace the Chopin's progression with a different one, you end up replicating... the Chopin's progression with very few permissible variants.
In other words, the melody in this type of quick flowing lines is all and is inextricably linked with the underlying harmony. Indeed: it springs from it, and changing one chord almost certainly means destroying the overlying melodic continuity.
In conclusion, this Study is not less than perfect as Chopin wrote it.
The good news is that Synfire has converted with a very high degree of approximation the melody of Chopin from a MIDI file. I had to manually bypass the Voice Leading in very few segments of the right hand (see the attached .cognac file), and I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the cleverness of Synfire.
One condition: you must manually replace all the horizontal scales of each chord with the corresponding chromatic scale. If, for example, Synfire proposes a minor harmonic scale under an F minor chord, you will need to select the F chromatic scale from the Horizontal Scale drop-down menu. And so on for all the remaining chords. In fact, Chopin used systematically minor second appoggiaturas, which confer to the Study an inimitable melancholic mood but that Synfire does not recognize if we accept the most common scales suggested (aeolian, melodic minor and so on).
All the best,
Roberto
chopin_25_2_64bit_.mp3