Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used To Complete Composer’s Unfinished Tenth Symphony
Daily Mail | 13 December 2019 | James Mills

A few notes scribbled in his notebook are all the German composer left of his symphony before his death in 1827.

Now, a team of musicologists and programmers is racing to complete a version of the piece using sophisticated computer software to predict what Beethoven had planned.

Beethoven began working on the Tenth Symphony alongside his Ninth, which includes the world-famous ‘Ode To Joy’.

But he quickly gave up on the Tenth, leaving only a few notes and drafts by the time he died aged 57.

In the project, machine-learning software has been fed all of Beethoven’s work and is now composing possible continuations of the symphony in the composer’s style.

Barry Cooper, a British composer and musicologist who himself wrote a hypothetical first movement for the Tenth Symphony in 1988, was more doubtful.

‘I listened to a short excerpt that has been created. It did not sound remotely like a convincing reconstruction of what Beethoven intended,’ said Cooper, a professor at the University of Manchester and the author of several works on Beethoven.

A project earlier this year to complete Schubert’s Eighth Symphony was seen by some reviewers as being closer to an American film soundtrack than the Austrian composer’s work.

AIAO: Amateur In, Amateur Out.