![\"AI-Beethoven-10th_Symphony\"](\"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/10\/AI-Beethoven-10th_Symphony.jpg\")
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When Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his 9th Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his 10th Symphony but, due to deteriorating health, wasn\u2019t able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches.<\/p>\n
Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what could have been. His notes teased at some magnificent reward, albeit one that seemed forever out of reach.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to the work of a team of music historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists, Beethoven\u2019s vision will come to life.<\/p>\n
I presided over the artificial intelligence side of the project, leading a group of scientists at the creative AI startup Playform AI that taught a machine both Beethoven\u2019s entire body of work and his creative process.<\/p>\n
A full recording of Beethoven\u2019s 10th Symphony is set to be released on Oct. 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere performance scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany \u2013 the culmination of a two-year-plus effort.<\/p>\n
Around 1817, the Royal Philharmonic Society in London commissioned Beethoven to write his 9th and 10th symphonies. Written for an orchestra, symphonies often contain four movements; the first is performed at a fast tempo, the second at a slower one, the third at a medium or fast tempo, and the last at a fast tempo.<\/p>\n
Beethoven completed his 9th Symphony in 1824, which concludes with the timeless \u201cOde to Joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, when it came to the 10th Symphony, Beethoven didn\u2019t leave much behind, other than some musical notes and a handful of ideas he had jotted down.<\/p>\n There have been some past attempts to reconstruct parts of Beethoven\u2019s 10th Symphony. Most famously, in 1988, musicologist Barry Cooper ventured to complete the first and second movements. He wove together 250 bars of music from the sketches to create what was, in his view, a production of the first movement that was faithful to Beethoven\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n Yet the sparseness of Beethoven\u2019s sketches made it impossible for symphony experts to go beyond that first movement.<\/p>\n In early 2019, Dr. Matthias R\u00f6der, 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\u2019s 10th Symphony in celebration of the composer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n R\u00f6der then compiled a team that included Austrian composer Walter Werzowa. Famous for writing Intel\u2019s 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\u2019s sketches and process his entire body of work, so the AI could be properly trained.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In June 2019, the group gathered for a two-day workshop at Harvard\u2019s music library. In a large room with a piano, a blackboard and a stack of Beethoven\u2019s sketchbooks spanning most of his known works, we talked about how fragments could be turned into a complete piece of music and how AI could help solve this puzzle, while still remaining faithful to Beethoven\u2019s process and vision.<\/p>\n The music experts in the room were eager to learn more about the sort of music AI had created in the past. I told them how AI had successfully generated music in the style of Bach. However, this was only a harmonization of an inputted melody that sounded like Bach. It didn\u2019t come close to what we needed to do: construct an entire symphony from a handful of phrases.<\/p>\n The AI needed to learn from Beethoven\u2019s entire body of work in order to create something the composer might have written.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the scientists in the room \u2014 myself included \u2014 wanted to learn about what sort of materials were available, and how the experts envisioned using them to complete the symphony.<\/p>\n The task at hand eventually crystallized. We would need to use notes and completed compositions from Beethoven\u2019s entire body of work \u2014 along with the available sketches from the 10th Symphony \u2014 to create something that Beethoven himself might have written.<\/p>\n This was a tremendous challenge. We didn\u2019t have a machine that we could feed sketches to, push a button and have it spit out a symphony. Most AI available at the time couldn\u2019t continue an uncompleted piece of music beyond a few additional seconds.<\/p>\n We would need to push the boundaries of what creative AI could do by teaching the machine Beethoven\u2019s creative process \u2014 how he would take a few bars of music and painstakingly develop them into stirring symphonies, quartets and sonatas.<\/p>\n As the project progressed, the human side and the machine side of the collaboration evolved. Werzowa, Gotham, Levin, and R\u00f6der deciphered and transcribed the sketches from the 10th Symphony, trying to understand Beethoven\u2019s intentions. Using his completed symphonies as a template, they attempted to piece together the puzzle of where the fragments of sketches should go \u2014 which movement, which part of the movement.<\/p>\n They had to make decisions, like determining whether a sketch indicated the starting point of a scherzo, which is a very lively part of the symphony, typically in the third movement. Or they might determine that a line of music was likely the basis of a fugue, which is a melody created by interweaving parts that all echo a central theme.<\/p>\n The AI side of the project \u2014 my side \u2014 found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks.<\/p>\n First, and most fundamentally, we needed to figure out how to take a short phrase, or even just a motif, and use it to develop a longer, more complicated musical structure, just as Beethoven would have done. For example, the machine had to learn how Beethoven constructed the 5th Symphony out of a basic four-note motif.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/10\/IMAGE_1_-_Beethoven-10th_Symphony.jpg\")
Assembling the team<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The project takes shape<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Piecing together Beethoven\u2019s creative process<\/strong><\/h3>\n