[HN Gopher] Artificial Intelligence completed Beethoven's unfini...
___________________________________________________________________
Artificial Intelligence completed Beethoven's unfinished Tenth
Symphony
Author : sizzle
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-09-29 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| PennRobotics wrote:
| I suspect many of the responses will be overly critical in a way
| that is borderline unfair.
|
| This is an AI informed by the opinions of multiple scholarly
| experts. I'm sure they'll keep smashing "train" and "generate"
| and adding new inputs until it meets some standard of sounding
| like authentic music. The public already accepts several
| completions of deceased composors' works. People pay to hear
| Simon Rattle's fourth movement of Bruckner's Ninth. Everyone
| plays the same version of Fantaisie Impromptu despite
| instructions to never posthumously publish Chopin's manuscripts.
| There's a Youtube completion of Morning Glories that receives
| great praise despite the missing sections lacking faithfulness to
| Scott Joplin's technique and style. If David Cope's algorithmic
| machine had announced it had written the missing sections, he'd
| be burned at the stake by his Youtube audience.
|
| Against the criticism that this sounds like existing Beethoven
| music: I'm relieved it doesn't sound like new Stravinsky. New
| Metallica often sounds like bits of old Metallica except strange
| and different and sometimes confusing.
|
| It sounds decent. There are probably elements of "new and
| different" that are missing, but there are repeated themes with
| variations, interplay between minor and major keys, and similar
| note/rhythm structures to historical Beethoven---maybe not as
| much dynamic variation, tutti rests, and solo/soli melodies as
| the Ninth. I admittedly don't know much about the full catalogue
| of Beethoven and expect many of the critics here also mostly know
| the Ninth.
|
| My personal wish for gauging this work (once it's complete) would
| be more quantitative: a "classical music earworm neural net" plus
| a "composer uniqueness rating".
|
| The first would basically max out on La donna e mobile or
| Messiah. These are the melodies that would be instantly learnable
| and widely recognizable. If each Beethoven composition rates
| higher than the last, we can expect the Tenth to be the Gold
| Standard of earworms. This could be your alarm clock tone and
| still never get annoying. Otherwise, we'd need to accept that the
| posted version isn't absolutely epic but still more worthy of
| release as a "what if" instead of doomed to history as a bunch of
| lost, incomplete sketches and musical riffs of a angry, sick,
| deaf lunatic. A best guess, if you will.
|
| A uniqueness AI should be able to say Pictures at an Exhibition
| and Night On Bald Mountain came from the same pen but are not
| built with the same bricks. That is, the composer and style are
| the same but the themes and melodies are unique even though they
| share the same twelve notes, twenty lengths, eight dynamic
| markings, etc. Until you can show that Bach never ever repeated a
| lick from one chorale to the next (as well as what constitutes
| the length of a lick... seven notes? ten seconds? two measures?),
| it's unfair to accuse this composition of borrowing from other
| works. If the Proposed Tenth scores the same uniqueness as any
| other Beethoven work when removed from its training set, there
| would be no leg for the argument that this is just a derivative
| work. We are all derivative works making more derivative works.
|
| An extra wish would be to know Beethoven's published versions
| varied from the early sketches. (Someone already commented this
| same thought.) From what I recall, Bruckner's Ninth underwent
| multiple revisions before he finally croaked at 80 percent
| complete. His first sketches were reportedly not very playable
| but were fine-tuned by him as well as a few well-known
| contemporaries. If Beethoven always kept adding to sketches but
| never really changing the line, we can assume everything in the
| sketches here would belong in the symphony. Otherwise, I hope the
| research team is figuring out a way to guess what all the changes
| would have been.
|
| In short, don't knock the arrangement just because you know it
| was informed by an algorithm. After all, what are genius
| composers if not masters of taking only existing music and
| established rules and bending them in new ways---in other words,
| living algorithms?
| boygobbo wrote:
| > My personal wish for gauging this work (once it's complete)
| would be more quantitative: a "classical music earworm neural
| net" plus a "composer uniqueness rating".
|
| This sounds a little like marking your own homework...
| PennRobotics wrote:
| There are plenty of people that recognize the Seventh
| Symphony, but it's not what people are chanting at soccer
| matches or their first thought when this composer is
| mentioned. Still, you could realize after enough listening
| that they come from the same dude.
|
| I think my idea is closer to providing two good adversaries
| if this piece were rated by an adversarial network. If the
| generated Tenth can't even clear these bars, then I would be
| more accepting of someone's negative or hostile opinion...
| and only if that opinion was formed after knowing the
| composition was made by machine.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Genius composers are masters of taking existing music and
| bending it in genius ways.
|
| There's quite a bit more to it than being new.
|
| It's about expression, not structure. You can copy-with-
| statistical-inference the structures but all that gets you - at
| best - is a kind of melted parody of the source works.
|
| You can also do what David Cope does, which is take one
| structure and overlay it on another. That sounds a lot more
| coherent, but that's because it is - inevitably.
|
| Creating that kind of coherence and _intent_ from scratch -
| deliberately, and being able to assess that you 've created it,
| and to what extent - is very probably impossible with
| statistical techniques.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| After writing my comment and reading yours and thinking a
| while...
|
| I think if somebody saw the first five songs of Hamilton, a
| few lines from thirty other songs, plus a four-measure theme
| for each character... it wouldn't matter what other non-
| Hamilton knowledge of the composers or cutting edge tools a
| person had; it would be impossible to write anything remotely
| close to the real Hamilton (even if you compared just the
| music without lyrics and knew the full dialogue). Maybe
| something cute and sometimes clever could be composed... but
| it wouldn't even be close to the real thing.
|
| Though this music sample is interesting, there's total
| validity when people say that we can't call this THE finished
| version.
|
| Even with a handful of dedicated experts working on this
| project, it can't possibly be close to the real thing if
| Ludwig had been able to finish this symphony.
| macrolocal wrote:
| I bet some kind of nested generative-adversarial approach
| could do that.
| simorley wrote:
| Beethoven's Ninth was apparently used to set the size of the CD,
| though there are disputes whether this was actually the case or
| corporate advertising.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_B...
| bserge wrote:
| ...And It Sucked
| Animats wrote:
| I suspect we'll see "Cover Song Generator" any time now. Put in
| name of selected song (or just a lyrics prompt), put in name of
| selected musician, press start. The RIAA is going to hate this.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully? The
| site guidelines include " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| This is particularly important when threads are fresh, because
| they're so sensitive to initial conditions.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yes. I wonder how a forum could be set up so that the topic
| of conversations are not determined by so strongly determined
| by who responded first.
| clircle wrote:
| "Artificial intelligence extrapolated music pattern"
| pugworthy wrote:
| The title of the article is really kind of nonsense in a way. I
| mean I could write music and declare I had completed Beethoven's
| Unfinished Tenth Symphony, but it wouldn't mean I did a good job.
|
| Unless it's deeply compelling, believable, or otherwise worthy of
| performance and audience applause, it really doesn't mean much -
| at least based on that title.
| int_19h wrote:
| The article specifically talks about how they have tested it
| with audiences, who were unable to tell the AI-generated bits
| from the original ones.
| platz wrote:
| How do you know beethoven didn't intend for the remainder to
| be 79 bars of silence? (This is a serious question.)
|
| Fundamentally, current A.I. is predicated on replicating
| stationary distributions. In that sense they are deeply
| conservative and can only "predict the past", instead of
| creating true novelty.
|
| > they have tested it with audiences
|
| What do they do if the audience says that there are too many
| notes?
| blue1 wrote:
| The sample at the end of the article seems to me at the same time
| Beethoven-like and meaningless. Made me think of the "screams of
| the damned" AI recreation of Frank Sinatra
|
| <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/09/deepfake-pop-m...>
| tunesmith wrote:
| I actually had a really hard time determining where beat 1 is
| of each measure. It feels kind of meandering, like a touch of
| musical dysphasia.
| ekelsen wrote:
| It feels like I'm hearing hints of past symphonies, but nothing
| new and it lacks overall coherence.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Actually working in the field, I hate stuff like this so much.
| Like, it's a cool project, but the reporting and marketing and
| hype is all so fucking awful. Imagine if a person had done this
| instead of a model:
|
| > [I] Completed Beethoven's Unfinished Tenth Symphony
|
| > Now, thanks to [my] work, Beethoven's vision will come to life.
|
| And so on. Your reaction would probably be "no, this isn't
| Beethoven's vision, it's some random person's vision." In this
| case, it's that much more egregious because it's not written by a
| journalist through a game of telephone. It's actually written in
| this breathless magical way by the person who built the model.
|
| There needs to be a new fallacy or something: "Appeal to AI."
| Because otherwise we treat "AI completed Beethoven's vision" as
| somehow more True or Correct than "I completed Beethoven's
| vision." And it's much more dangerous when we apply that free
| pass to things like "AI predicts recidivism." Is it just riding
| off of how people perceive mathematical correctness or something?
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Not working in the field at all, I completely agree! Well said.
| [deleted]
| williamtrask wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. We have very little basis to judge
| whether the algorithm did Beethoven justice and so all the
| celebration is really for a non-event. A computer wrote down
| notes after other notes. Maybe they sound not too dissonant.
| That's not news.
| kovek wrote:
| I don't think a computer could know what the artist intended to
| create.
|
| I wonder, how accurate can the computer be at predicting the
| next note (the first note from the uncompleted section)? Is
| that an interesting question?
| kace91 wrote:
| That can be proven though. Keep a work by the author out of
| the training phase, then see if the model can predict it from
| an incomplete version.
|
| Otherwise...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Yes, it's a very interesting question! This how many language
| models work. You might be interested in reading about a
| metric called perplexity. [0]
|
| The major caveat is that it's invalid to evaluate on
| completed, polished work, and then extrapolate to what's
| practically a napkin note. Another important note about it is
| that some next token predictions are harder than others. For
| example, try predicting the next word (the _____) in each of
| these:
|
| > I really love this Dr Seuss Book called "The Cat in the
| _____
|
| versus
|
| > I really love this Dr Seuss book called "The Cat in the
| Hat." _______
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity
| shoto_io wrote:
| I agree that the media is overhyping AI without fully
| comprehending what it can and cannot do.
|
| At the same time, I believe your criticism is a little off-
| base. Sure, it's hard to tell it apart from how a person would
| have finished the symphony. That, however, is precisely the
| point. That's what's so fascinating about it.
| LuisMondragon wrote:
| > There needs to be a new fallacy or something: "Appeal to AI."
|
| I applaud and welcome this idea
| nabla9 wrote:
| This thing has been going on for a long time.
|
| First time some seriously tired to make "computer composer",
| maybe 1960s?, it passed double blind test flying colors.
| Professional musicians declared that computer could never
| compose something like this" about computer made music.
|
| Using learning and using generative grammars has been used to
| imitate different jazz musicians in 90s.
|
| Some modern composers use computers to generate music, they
| just tweak parameters until it is how they like it. It's still
| human made.
| belval wrote:
| What pains me is that these are the exact articles that make
| people outside of the field say "AI fails to deliver", "AI is
| just a bunch of ifs" or "AI is just snake oil the new winter is
| coming".
|
| Most actually interesting ML/DL projects are not stuff that the
| public directly interacts with so you end up with a ton of
| inconsequential stuff like this article and real progress is
| just not visible.
| int_19h wrote:
| "It [Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides
| number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations
| could be expressed by those of the abstract science of
| operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations
| to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the
| engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations
| of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical
| composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations,
| the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music
| of any degree of complexity or extent."
|
| - Ada Lovelace, 1843
| mickhead23 wrote:
| Feeding the composer's works prior to the Ninth would have been
| much more compelling. The question then becomes whether the AI's
| Ninth sounds anything at all like the actual Ninth.
| goda90 wrote:
| I imagine there would be as much similarity between the AI
| symphony and Beethoven's one as there is between Beethoven's
| other symphonies, which isn't that much. The human mind just
| has so many more inputs besides previous work to influence its
| output. Beethoven's whole life experience factored into the
| Ninth's creation.
|
| That's not to say we shouldn't try it out.
| mLuby wrote:
| Exactly! AI, there's your goal, now bridge that gap.
|
| Even non-ML software is capable of surprising its designers
| with so-called "emergent behavior" so creativity _is_
| possible. The Starcraft II AI AlphaStar (which as I
| understand it played 200 years worth of Starcraft against
| itself before it was able to beat the pro human players)
| demonstrated some "unusual strategies... occasionally wildly
| off meta."
| https://www.pcgamesn.com/starcraft-2/starcraft-2-deepmind-ai
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I think this is an excellent use of AI and I will happily listed
| to the results.
|
| Music is great, no matter what the source.
| barberpole wrote:
| Harmonically and formally not as adventurous as the scherzo of
| Symphony #1.
| varelse wrote:
| Local context without a coherent structure as usual.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The article was very disappointing not answering to the most
| obvious question of "how can a pattern manager that does not
| understand (at this stage of the discipline) the very patterns it
| uses and generates, compete with no less than Beethoven". A large
| number of experts was reportedly used: how their contribution
| could correct the obvious and known faults of current generative
| AI would have been the big question.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-29 23:01 UTC)