No. I am not a music expert. Nor in artificial intelligence (AI). It is what I would like. And that is why I am going to listen to what scientists say or do, what research progresses in universities, or what companies develop with their disruptive and cutting-edge technologies, such as AI itself. Even without being a legacy in the matter, I can say that the noble art of music runs through my blood. My father was a musician, and with his notes, his saxophone and the pieces by Beethoven, Tchaikovski, Mozart or Schubert, among others, my father tried to appease my hyperactivity when I had not yet reached my first five years.
Yes. Since I was five years old, I saw the staves, treble clefs, half notes, quarter notes, round notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes,… and the scores of the classical composers that my father liked, including Schubert. At an early age I listened to that music, which calmed me down, calmed me down, and I liked it, although I didn’t understand it. And whoever educated my ear explained to me that Schubert died at the age of 31, from gonorrhea complicated by typhoid fever, after suffering from syphilis for many years.
When my father explained a score to me, he would tell me what the author wanted to have with his music, and in Schubert’s, in the Unfinished Symphony, in his two finished movements, he told me that his passion for music could be seen, and the suffering that he endured in his life with his illness. And when Huawei called me to tell me that their artificial intelligence had finished Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, I didn’t hesitate. I wanted to hear what the 7 nanometer Kirin 980 processor and its dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU) had been able to do from a trendy, young composer, like Lucas Cantor, with a very band-focused orchestral background. movie soundtracks.
In six months, we were told, the AI in Huawei’s processor was able to compute and analyze all of Schubert’s music output in his 31-year life. Creations such as La Bella Molinera or La Muerte y la Maiden, written in his last years of life, or the two movements of the so-called Unfinished Symphony, which began in October 1822. Only six years later he would die, and his work would be saved more forty years in a drawer.
Cantor told us in London, in the anteroom of Cadogan Hall where I could hear both the two movements that Schubert completed and those that the Chinese manufacturer’s artificial intelligence completed, that he had only taken three weeks to write the score for the two unfinished movements, thanks to the previous work of the Kirin 980. And when asked, after his experience with Huawei and its AI, if he would use artificial intelligence to compose his own work, he was blunt in stating that “yes he would”. And he also said that he would recommend it to any of his colleagues.
And yes, this is not the first experience in the world of using artificial intelligence to finish a piece of music, or to build a new one, or to generate new sounds, tones, timbres or instrumental nuances. I do not think, like some free criticism received, that Huawei has inflated its ego with this experience as if it were unique or differential. “Just”, said Walter Ji, president of Huawei’s Consumer Business Unit in Europe, “is a demonstration of what artificial intelligence can do in conjunction with human intelligence. It is not about machines replacing people, but about complementing them and helping to generate new solutions in all areas of life ”.
I can only say that I agree, with Walter Ji, and with Mike Dillinger, and with everyone who thinks that way. AI, despite its shadows, will help us. And if my father, who instilled in me a love for classical music, and for the meaning of what the notes said, had seen this finished work by Schubert, he might not have understood it, and would have rejected it. But I would have explained to him, as he did to me when he did not understand what he was hearing, that technology allows us and will allow us to work better to create more passionate stories and, why not, more beautiful music.
Lastly, my humble impression of what Huawei’s artificial intelligence created, movements three and four of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Having listened to it only once, without calm, and with lights that on stage reminded me more of a disco, and I did not like them, the third movement did not remind me of Schubert or his unfinished work. I heard a lot of string, a lot of violin and little percussion and wind in the same piece. I think Cantor’s work, for my taste, improved in the fourth movement. But I will listen to it again, closing my eyes, as my father told me to listen to classical works, and noticing each of the instruments that entered the scene and finding their meaning.
