{"id":334563,"date":"2021-09-03T19:46:50","date_gmt":"2021-09-03T16:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/unfinished-beethoven-symphony-reimagined-in-a-click\/"},"modified":"2021-09-03T19:46:50","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T16:46:50","slug":"unfinished-beethoven-symphony-reimagined-in-a-click","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/unfinished-beethoven-symphony-reimagined-in-a-click\/","title":{"rendered":"#Unfinished Beethoven symphony reimagined in a click"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Unfinished Beethoven symphony reimagined in a click<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n To mark their 10th anniversary season this year, the Nexus orchestra has decided to use artificial intelligence to create a four-minute extract of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.
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As conductor Guillaume Berney marks the opening downbeat, the first chords ring out in a Lausanne concert hall of what could conceivably be an extract of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony\u2014if the great German composer had ever managed to complete the piece.<\/p>\n

The classical music world has often speculated what Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) would have gone on to write after his monumental Ninth Symphony.<\/p>\n

And a number of musicologists and composers have already ventured to orchestrate and complete some of the scraps of notation they believe were his first sketches for his next symphonic masterpiece. <\/p>\n

But to mark their 10th anniversary season this year, Berney and the Nexus orchestra have decided to use artificial intelligence to create a four-minute extract which they have dubbed BeethovANN Symphony 10.1. <\/p>\n

“That is not a typo,” Berney told the audience at the first night, with a second performance scheduled in Geneva on Friday.<\/p>\n

Berney explains that the ANN refers to the artificial neural network that created it, basically without human intervention. <\/p>\n

“We don’t know what it will sound like,” Berney acknowledged to AFP ahead of the Lausanne concert. <\/p>\n

The final score was only generated and printed out hours before the performance, after computer programme designer Florian Colombo oversaw the final step in what for him has been a years-long process.<\/p>\n

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\n The final score was only generated and printed out hours before the performance.
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‘Like watching a birth’<\/b><\/p>\n

Seated in his small apartment with a view over the old city of Lausanne and the Alps in the distance, Colombo made a couple small changes before clicking a button to generate the score. <\/p>\n

“It’s like watching a birth,” Berney said as he picked up the first pages emerging from the printer. <\/p>\n

The excitement was palpable as the freshly created sheet music was presented to the orchestra.<\/p>\n

The musicians eagerly began rehearsing for the evening concert, many smiling with surprise as the harmonies unfolded.<\/p>\n

“This is an emotional experience for me,” said Colombo, himself a cellist, as the sound filled the hall.<\/p>\n

“There is a touch of Beethoven there, but really, it is BeethovANN. Something new to discover.”<\/p>\n

Berney agreed. <\/p>\n

“It works,” he said. “There are some very good parts, and a few that are a bit out of character, but it’s nice,” the conductor said, acknowledging though that “maybe it lacks that spark of genius.”<\/p>\n

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\n The classical music world has often speculated what Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) would have gone on to write after his monumental Ninth Symphony.
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Colombo, a computer scientist at the EPFL technical university, developed his algorithm using so-called deep-learning, a subset of artificial intelligence aimed at teaching computers to “think” via structures modelled on the human brain or ANNs.
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To generate something that might possibly pass as an extract from Beethoven’s Tenth, Colombo first fed the computer all of the master’s 16 string quartets, explaining that the chamber works provided a very clear sense of his harmonic and melodic structures. <\/p>\n

He then asked it to create a piece around one of the theme<\/a> fragments found in Beethoven’s sparse notes that musicologists believe could have been for a new symphony.<\/p>\n

“The idea is to just push a button to produce a complete musical score for an entire symphonic orchestra completely without intervention,” Colombo said.<\/p>\n

“That is, except for all the work I put in ahead of time,” added the computer programmer who has been working for nearly a decade towards deep-learning-generated music.<\/p>\n

‘Not blasphemous’<\/b><\/p>\n

Colombo said that using a computer to try to recreate something begun by one of the world’s greatest musical geniuses was not encroaching on the human creative process.<\/p>\n

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\n The excitement was palpable as the freshly created sheet music was presented to the orchestra.
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Instead, he said, he saw his algorithm as a new tool for making musical composition more accessible and for broadening human creation.<\/p>\n

While the programme “can digest what has already been done and propose something similar,” he said the aim was for “humans to use the tools to create something new.” <\/p>\n

“It is not blasphemous at all,” Berney agreed, stressing that “no one is trying to replace Beethoven.”<\/p>\n

In fact, he said, the German composer would likely have been a fan of the algorithm.<\/p>\n

“Composers at that time were all avantgarde,” he said, pointing out that the best were “always eager to adopt new methods.”\n <\/p>\n\n

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AI puts final notes on Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \u00a9 2021 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n Unfinished Beethoven symphony reimagined in a click (2021, September 3)
\n retrieved 3 September 2021
\n from https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news<\/a>\/2021-09-unfinished-beethoven-symphony-reimagined-click.html<\/p>\n

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