I ran across this just too late to include in the Friday Miscellanea. In this article in the National Post, we are given an account of a project to "complete" a 10th Symphony of Beethoven from a few fragmentary sketches: How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony. The headline is the usual journalistic hyperbole. Here is the reality:
In early 2019, Dr. Matthias Röder, the director of the Karajan Institute, an organization in Salzburg, Austria, that promotes music technology, contacted me. He explained that he was putting together a team to complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony in celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday. Aware of my work on AI-generated art, he wanted to know if AI would be able to help fill in the blanks left by Beethoven.
The challenge seemed daunting. To pull it off, AI would need to do something it had never done before. But I said I would give it a shot.
Röder then compiled a team that included Austrian composer Walter Werzowa. Famous for writing Intel’s signature bong jingle, Werzowa was tasked with putting together a new kind of composition that would integrate what Beethoven left behind with what the AI would generate. Mark Gotham, a computational music expert, led the effort to transcribe Beethoven’s sketches and process his entire body of work so the AI could be properly trained.
The team also included Robert Levin, a musicologist at Harvard University who also happens to be an incredible pianist. Levin had previously finished a number of incomplete 18th-century works by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.
So, a committee of musicologists and computer experts sat down and composed an entirely new piece of music based on a few brief fragmentary sketches by Beethoven. There is no possible sense in which this could be regarded as "completing" an imaginary symphony by Beethoven which could only have come into existence in the usual way, through Beethoven's own torturous compositional process. So if and when there is a performance the program should read:
3 comments:
That would be Truth in Advertising in a Classical sense.
About Beethoven 10th AI-written symphony..
I (online) listened to the premiere, which was on Saturday evening in Germany.. As a curious about the AI developments, but with no conviction, as I know the limits. It was a disappointment, as usual. To start with, a tiring long useless talk and staging, as it was an awards ceremony, to psychologically condition the audience. Then the play. Two movements, Scherzo and Adagio-like, for 20 minutes in total. Orchestra not in good tune, not rhythmically in place, not enough rehearsal, in spite of the expensive sponsor for this prestigious event (Deutsche Telekom). Musically speaking, it was the usual AI patchwork of out-of-context sketches glued together, with awkward writing, even orchestration, as I didn’t recognized any clear Beethoven palette. The style was quite good and homogenous at beginning, for the first minute, but then quickly degraded. Clear thematic borrowing from 5th symphony (Scherzo), and plagiarism of 8th sonata 2nd movement theme (Adagio). They included an organ (!) to the 2nd movement (with Cameron Carpenter), which started awfully to play a long A pedal while a G Major movement was evolving, destroying thus all harmony. It was a big one.. At the concert end applause, Cameron Carpenter was showing edgy face, never had seen him like that. Musically, apart from very beginning, nothing so much related to Beethoven, no sense of inner music cohesion because of the typical AI fragmented work, and a lot of weaknesses in the thematic writing and harmonic management, even historical faults. As they said, this project took many years of intense study and completion (!). I really wonder how involved musicians can waste so much time for such a poor result. A good composer can do it in one month. It would have been more simple to give the task to such a person. I also suspect that they cheated, using human re-writing to cover the AI deficiencies. Beethoven must turn in his grave, as we say in French, and the composers still have long happy times ahead..
Thanks so much Eric for this followup review. It does tend to confirm my general thoughts on the matter. We really seem to be deeply deluded by the illusions of technology and AI to the point that we fail to see that the Emperor really has no new clothes! Projects like this attract a great deal of sponsorship and attention while real composers struggle along on a pittance. Thanks again for your detailed comments.
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