Beethoven's 10th Symphony will be released in its entirety on October 9, 2021.
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| [Beethoven's completed 10th Symphony] |
Ludwig van Beethoven passed away on March 26, 1827. With only a few pages of written notes, his Tenth Symphony is incomplete. However, a group of musicologists and artificial intelligence professionals has developed an intriguing work that imagines how the piece may have been based on the surviving notes and previous works of the German composer. The first movement of the symphony, played by a royal orchestra, has already been made available to the public, and the entire piece will be performed on October 9th.
An International Team
Ahmed Elgammal, professor and laboratory director of the Art & AI Lab at Rutgers Institution, a public university in New Jersey, leads the Artificial Intelligence team. "In the early months of 2019, I was approached by Professor Matthias Röder, head of the Karajan Institute in Salzburg, which is also active in the promotion of music technologies", Elgammal adds. He said that "he was putting together a group to finish Beethoven's Tenth Symphony, and he was curious if my background in artificial intelligence applied to art may be useful in filling in the gaps in Beethoven's work. The task looked impossible: Artificial Intelligence had never progressed this far before. But I agreed."
The team was formed, with members including Austrian composer Walter Werzowa (author of the Intel jingle, which almost all computer users are familiar with), Mark Gotham, a computational music expert who led the effort to transcribe Beethoven's sketches and process his entire work so that artificial intelligence could be properly trained, and others.
It's a technological issue, but it's not the only one.
"Artificial Intelligence had already been employed to produce music in the style of Bach, according to Elgammal. However, it was only the harmonization of a tune, as Bach may have intended. It wasn't even close to what was required to finish this project: composing a whole symphony from a few scattered musical ideas."
"We realized that, in order to complete the piece, we needed to examine all of Beethoven's completed compositions, as well as the accessible sketches for the Tenth Symphony, in order to produce something that Beethoven himself might have composed. It was a huge undertaking. We didn't have a machine that accepted drawings in the stomach and then spat out a symphony when you pressed a button. Most of the Artificial Intelligence on the market at the time couldn't complete a piece of music in more than a few seconds."
The Workflow
As a result, the project required human intervention to determine how to create the transitions between parts of the composition, as well as a thousand other issues that had developed over time, due to the expertise of the team's musicologists. “First, we had to understand how a small backing track, or even just a theme, might evolve into a longer and more complicated musical structure,” Elgammal says of the Artificial Intelligence effort. For example, the system had to understand how Beethoven constructed the Fifth Symphony from a simple four-note theme (the very famous G-G-G-E flat).
"The working group gathered in Bonn in November 2019 at the Beethoven House Museum, where the composer was born and reared, according to Elgammal.
The conference served as a litmus test to see if Artificial Intelligence could finish the job. We printed the AI-generated musical scores, and a pianist performed them in front of a gathering of journalists, music academics, and Beethoven aficionados in the museum's modest concert hall. We asked the audience to inform us where the phrases in the German composer's notes stopped and where the section "produced" by Artificial Intelligence began. They had no idea how to respond to us."
The work was then resumed. "Elgammal says that as the research progressed, AI's capabilities progressed as well. We developed and coordinated two entire movements of nearly 20 minutes each over the following 18 months."
Beethoven's 10th Symphony will be released in its entirety on October 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere in Beethoven's birthplace of Bonn, Germany.