Artificial intelligence can now create music. For more than 200 years, composers and virtuosos puzzled over one of the most intriguing works of classical music—Symphony No. 8 Franz Schubert. Franz Schubert did not finish this symphony. He abandoned it six years before he died. As such, composers have always been curious about what it would have sounded.
Today, artificial intelligence is helping out in solving this mystery. Lucas Cantor, a film and TV composer, uses an AI to complete the symphony. In this regard, Cantor is not the only person doing this. Many composers he has worked with, all of whom were eager to try new technology.
How does AI work?
Artificial intelligence has a pattern-recognition system. If it has enough data, it can find these patterns and use them to create music. The decisions that the AI makes are all dependent on the completeness of the pattern. For Symphony NO. 8, the AI’s task is to determine which note should go in the composition. The people backing this project understood that AI could do it.
It is not the first time that people used AI to make something creative. In Munich, some artists used AI to recognize patterns in oil portraits. The final product is an ever-changing portrait, not in oil but on a screen.
Today, experts in MIT and Microsoft already have a system that can curate art. The AI will show the user what kind of art he will likely enjoy based on his social media history.
In another area, software from Open AI uses artificial intelligence to write a small portion of a story. The results are so amazing that people began to worry about AI’s capability of producing fake news. Some people argue that if this AI goes to the wrong hands, like propagandists or hostile nations, they may use it to attack their enemies through disinformation.
In music, Cantor and the Huawei company decided to build one that could complete Schubert’s symphony. However, there was one thing they had no decision for first: it was the kind of musical data that they would feed the AI. Cantor and Huawei were not sure if they would use 100% classical music, Western or both. They had to feed it more than 2,000 pieces of piano music from the late composer.
What makes this amazing is that the app runs on a mobile phone—specifically, the Mate 20. The immediate goal is to make the AI think like Schubert in a musical sense. This kind of “thinking” not just includes the musical patterns but also the melody.
Can AI replace composers?
In the world of gaming, be it contemporary or financial gaming like an online casino, AI is an essential tool. It allows the companies to deliver a personalized experience to the user. Many pundits have said before that AI could disrupt and automate industries. For one, companies can use AI to deliver food and other things; the result is lost jobs for people who deliver.
The same thing goes for artists, musicians, and writers. However, experts also agree on one critical thing: AI can not replace the ability of a human being to inspire.
One counterargument is that everything in life is code. Even a beautiful piece of music is code, which artificial intelligence can learn. When a machine has enough data to process, it shall make music that sounds as if a human being composed it.
So, can AI eventually replace human musical composers? Cantor says that AI is just another tool. The AI is a helpful tool to augment the creative process. He likened it to a guitar, a composer’s tool to produce music. According to Cantor, AI cannot produce something on its own. To make it work, it has to be in the hands of a capable human being.
Some people might find it beneficial, like those who know how to code and love music. They lack the formal training to compose music, so the AI can help them.
What future does it bring?
There are some lingering questions about the use of AI in art. Who owns the output? AI can eventually replace composers who make music for promotions, like ads and jingles. Music that AI creates today is not that different from the sound we hear on ads or the radio station.
Does this mean that people will no longer hear fresh music? After all, the AI can only make variations of the music that is within its memory. If it does not get new data, it has no new material to work on.
To many AI proponents, the system will evolve. Today, there is great demand for artists to create music, and they are having a hard time keeping up with this demand. The answer to this is AI. After all, the listener does not even ask who made it.