The music community has been waiting for Beethoven’s 10th Symphony to be completed for almost 200 years. As part of its 250th birthday, Telekom dared to perfect it with experts from the fields of music and technology – with the help of artificial intelligence.
When looking at the sketches and the nine symphonies by Beethoven, even non-musicians can guess what a great task the project participants have undertaken. “A large part at the beginning of the project was actually finding a common language,” says Matthias Röder in the ntv podcast “So techt Germany”. He is the project manager of the “Beethoven X – the AI Project” team and head of the Karajan Institute in Salzburg. Many people from different cultures first had to come together. A musicologist speaks differently than a computer scientist and they in turn speak differently from a composer, says Röder.
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The idea for the project comes from Telekom. “It’s a really exciting topic. It’s really very difficult,” was Röder’s reaction when the Bonn-based company asked him about the experiment two years ago. For Telekom this is “definitely a research project,” agrees Claudia Pohlink. She is responsible for AI activities at Deutsche Telekom. “Where can one understand: Where does Beethoven end? And where does the AI begin?” – The project aims to answer these questions. That is important for the future.
This Saturday evening you can experience the concert live – on ntv.de, rtl.de, gala.de, stern.de and on Magenta TV. It starts at 7 p.m.
If you use artificial intelligence, the Telekom team also wants to know why the AI decided this way and not otherwise. “For us, the AI is always a support,” says Pohlink. As with the Beethoven project, at the end of the day there is always someone who can pull the rip cord “if the AI is going in the wrong direction,” explains the technology expert.
Training with previous symphonies
In the case of “Beethoven X”, however, the team was initially faced with the challenge of understanding Beethoven’s sketches and making them accessible to artificial intelligence. “This is a prime example here that technology enables us to do things that we would not be able to do without the technology,” says Röder. The neural network was trained in the style of the time and with Beethoven’s previous symphonies. But can AI really be creative? “Emotion makes everything or almost everything in music,” explains music expert Röder. There are also artists who have already included machine learning “in their toolbox”. The advantage of the technology is enormous.
In the new episode of “So techt Germany”, Matthias Röder and Claudia Pohlink tell what part artificial intelligence played in the creative implementation and whether there can be a kind of TÜV for artificial intelligence.