You can already hear a preview of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony completed by an artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has come to help us, to make life much easier and perhaps also to rewrite part of history that, in its time, could not be completed.
Now a group of music academics and also computer scientists have been able to of completing Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony with the help of machine learning in a project to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer.
Beethoven was never able to finish the Tenth Symphony. Be that as it may, now the Karajan Institute has been associated with scientists from the artificial intelligence startup called Playform led by Ahmed Elgammal to conclude it.
After the association they spent two years training an artificial intelligence model that has been supported by all the complete works of Beethoven and also giving it a goal: complete the Tenth Symphony from the original sketches.
For this, the expert in computational music Mark Gotham transcribed the sketches and processed all of Beethoven’s work to train machine learning algorithms, with the musicologist assisting in the project Robert Levin, from Harvard.
To do this, they initially conducted an intensive study of the sketches of the Tenth Symphony in order to determine what Beethoven’s intentions were for the piece.
Later, using the composer’s complete works as a template, they had to figure out which of Beethoven’s incomplete musical phrases belonged to the four movements of the symphony.
With this, artificial intelligence had to fill all those gaps in order to complete the Tenth Symphony. This required taking very short musical phrases of a few notes and expanding them into longer, more elaborate structures.
It also required understanding the musical form of each phrase to make sure the correct movement entered.
But as the project progressed scientists realized they had to ask a lot more of artificial intelligence. Affirm that “we realized that the AI had to be able to compose a coda, a segment that brings a section of a piece of music to its conclusion”.
He adds that he also had to determine which instruments would play each of the parts, and on top of that he had to do all of this in a way that the great composer could have done in his time.
To demonstrate to everyone the efficiency of his artificial intelligence, he showed a first test to journalists and music experts, who were surprised with the result.
They then ran a second test in front of other experts, much more familiar with Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony sketches, concluding that this algorithm had done a very good job of completing it.
If you want to hear a preview of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony finished by an artificial intelligence, you can listen to it in this link, although it will be fully revealed to the public on October 10.