Beethoven's Last Symphony Has Been Completed, Thanks to Artificial Intelligence
On the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's death, The Beethoven Project debuted a finished piece during a livestream.
Members of the Beethoven Project have used algorithms to finish composing his final uncompleted symphony.
When Beethoven died in 1827, he left behind nine symphonies that were complete and fragments of a 10th.
To mark the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, a team of musicologists and programmers, together with telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, launched the ambitious project of teaching a computer to complete the symphony using artificial intelligence, or AI.
In order to train the algorithm, the team played snippets of Beethoven.
An algorithm was left to improvise and then was taught what was appropriate and what could be viewed as a mistake.
The finished piece premiered during a livestream of Beethovenfest over the weekend.
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