Beethoven's Unfinished 10th Symphony Completed by an AI

Computer scientists teamed up with historians, musicologists, and composers to teach artificial intelligence how to compose like Beethoven

- By Ahmed Elgammal

When he died in 1827 at the age of 56, Ludwig van Beethoven left his 10th Symphony unfinished. Only a few handwritten notes briefly detailing his plans for the piece have survived, with most just being incomplete ideas or fragments of themes or melodies.

Now, a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists at Rutgers University-based startup Platform Al have trained an AI to mimic the great composer's style, and used it to write a complete symphony based on these initial sketches.

How much of Beethoven's manuscript was available for you to start from?

Beethoven left sketches in different forms, mainly musical sketches, but also some written notes with some ideas in as well.

Previously, in 1988, [English musicologist] Barry Cooper used the majority of these sketches, about 250 bars of music, that were meant for a first movement (in his attempt to complete the symphony). But what was left behind is really very little. So basically, like three bars of music here and four bars of music there and some rough sketches, which sound like basically the starting points of the main themes in the movements that he [Beethoven) wanted to write.

When you look at Beethoven and other classical composers, that's usually the case. They will work with the main theme and then develop it into a sequence of a couple of minutes and then another theme comes. That's the traditional way of composing, and that's exactly what the AI needed to learn: how Beethoven and other classical composers start with a theme and develop it. Like in the Fifth Symphony - 'da da da dah'. And then take that and evolve a whole movement around it.