Linz (Austria) (AFP) - Can
artificial intelligence turn out symphonies to match one of the greats of
classical music?
That was the question posed by
one unusual orchestra performance in the Austrian city of Linz on Friday, in
which Gustav Mahler's unfinished Symphony No.10 was played -- immediately
followed by six minutes of "Mahleresque" music written by software.
The project's creator says that
the two are clearly distinguishable but not everyone in the audience agreed.
"I couldn't really feel the
difference... I believe it was really well done," Maria Jose Sanchez
Varela, 34, a science and philosophy researcher from Mexico, told AFP.
The performance was part of
Linz's Ars Electronica Festival, which aims to highlight connections between
science, art and technology.
The brains behind the pioneering
performance was AI researcher and composer Ali Nikrang, who works at the Ars
Electronica Futurelab research centre affiliated with the festival.
He used the open-source AI
software MuseNet to write the music.
"It all sounds like music,
there are emotions, but someone who really knows Mahler will notice immediately
that it is not Mahler," Nikrang told AFP, admitting Mahler's typical
"harmonic expressions" were not quite there yet.
He said AI learned from
"data from the past, from data left to us by Mahler" so it may be
able to create an exact copy of Mahler, but it still could not come up with a
"concept" or overall theme for the music the way the classical
composer himself did.
But Nikrang says that AI has
nevertheless made great strides.
Working with the first 10 notes
of Mahler's Symphony No. 10, the software gave him four suggested segments, out
of which he chose one, following which it continued giving him four more
segments and so on.
In all, Nikrang evaluated a few
dozen pieces before choosing what spectators heard on Friday.
"All the suggestions were
quite good... That is not obvious with AI, at least given the state of the
technology five months ago" Nikrang said, adding that MuseNet had enabled
a jump in quality.
Christine Schoepf, the Ars
Electronica festival's co-director, said that back when she took part in the
very first edition 40 years ago, "of course we couldn't have guessed what
would happen with AI".
"The fact it would progress
in such quick steps wasn't foreseeable," she said.
- Lacking 'emotional depth' -
Experts say the project
highlights interesting questions.
"This is of course really
exciting," said Aljoscha Burchardt of the German Research Center for
Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
"One wonders whether the
machines are so smart that they can accomplish great music, or whether the
music wasn't such a great accomplishment after all?," Burchardt asks.
"Maybe the pieces followed a
graspable logic that in the past only very good composers knew, and now a
machine can do it. That's the question," he told AFP.
With computers churning out work
at a speed composers cannot compete with, prices could drop, but on the other
hand -- just as in other fields where "hand-made" commands more
prestige -- artists who write their music without software could be able to
charge a premium, Burchardt said.
Machines also still needed humans
to guide them, Austrian music expert Christian Scheib said.
"Even with highly-complex
AI, it depends on the artistic quality and skills of the respective
composer," he told AFP.
And of course, AI isn't yet able
to explain its projects to journalists either.
As Nikrang predicted, some
spectators noticed when AI took over the composition in Friday night's
performance.
One of them, Manuela Klaut, said:
"I somehow thought suddenly: 'Ah, it is getting a bit more arbitrary' or
something like that'."
But she admitted that it was hard
to pinpoint what exactly changed, and the overall performance was still
"great".
"I felt slightly that the
emotional depth that you have in a Mahler composition was missing, maybe also
the melancholy," the 39-year-old from Germany told AFP.
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