A complete algorithm of the mysterious' Unfinished Symphony & # 39; from Schubert | Culture

Franz Schubert is a perpetual enigma. He died young at the age of thirty-one, but instead of using it in an intense life, like so many other musicians, he was plunged into a lonely melancholy in the cafes as a way to express his total submission to the creation. "The state should take care of me," he wrote to a friend to report on his dedication to work. And if he lived in modern times, the one who would deal with it would be the Chinese technology company Huawei, which, using an algorithm and an artificial intelligence, composed the conclusion of his Eighth Symphony called Unfinished . It was the penultimate of his catalog of orchestral works. For years, there were all sorts of theories about whether the author had come to finish this work, designed for the Graz Music Society, but that someone, maybe a little friend, would have missed the last part. However, when it became apparent that Schubert had simply not finished it, Unfinished had already become the most mysterious and interpreted work of its author.

Thus, under the tangle of controversy that it aroused, its symbolic influx appears again, now as the target of artificial intelligence. Huawei presented Monday – at a private hearing at London's Cadogan Hall, an interpretation of the English Session Orchestra under the regency of Julian Gallant – his version of the play, which has already been delivered before his debut. [19659002] In a statement, the company says that the version was created with the help of an artificial intelligence model that directly benefits from the neural processing technology applied to its handsets. From the timbre, tone and measure of the first and second movements preserved, the model generates a melody for the third and fourth non-existent or lost (but planned) movements. Later, Huawei worked with composer Lucas Cantor to establish an orchestral score of the melody, in the sense that Schubert was supposed to be looking at the time.

The Spanish composer José María Sánchez-Verdú gives us the following context: "Since the sixties this kind of work, they have already been put into practice in the United States with the first computers. the creativity of a composer through algorithmic processes developed by a machine is an extremely ancient thing. "

Distraction maneuvers are also not worth it. "Everything is devoted to advertising, to the launch of technological news and, in addition, to the big names and works of European culture, as now Schubert." There are many attempts before the Chinese technology society. "There are several versions that composers have developed about this symphony over the past 20 years, and I personally find no encouragement or interest in these proposals," says Sánchez-Verdú.

This composer, a world reference in his field, believes that the human mind and fantasy deal with many aspects beyond what any software could develop. "In statistical terms, algorithms and possibilities, such jobs can be created correctly, but the aesthetic, social, personal and many other aspects, such as originality, surprise, daring, imperfections , the psychological and psychiatric aspects, the same concept of error as a tool … all these aspects are consubstantial to the mind a creator, not a machine. "

Fabián Panisello, also composer and head of Plural Ensamble group, finds the experience inappropriate. "Not only for ethical reasons but also because a designer can make a qualitative leap at any time.It is unpredictable for any type of artificial intelligence." a composer dominates the fundamental data and the metadata in relation to the resources that his work requires.The rest is only form and appearance … ", comments the musician, who has just published his work in Spain The Three Kings before presenting it this year in Nice, Vienna, Munich, Basel and Tel Aviv

For the conductor Lucía Marín, the artificial composition "is a good hook to bring the technology of art, an interesting experience, "he says. "The fact that a technological company proposes and solves an acrobatic exercise with such characteristics seems to me to be a heroism and a daring intellectual who shows us where we are going." But do not forget that [a obra] is devoid of the essential: the soul Music, in its essence, intends to transcend us to all those infinite ideas of the immaterial which, as the Little Prince said, are invisible to the eyes. "

When Marín works a score, questions arise: "is the unacknowledged motive by which a composer finds himself driven by the irrepressible force of writing what he feels? It takes me a long time to answer, sometimes After all, every piece of art leaves the heart to reach the heart, as I usually answer.

Gustavo Gimeno, conductor and conductor of the Luxembourg Philharmonic, does not see either of reason at the initiativ e: the initiative is not aimed at the man, who does not belong to nature and who therefore lacks life. "For what? Honestly, it does not give me any interest … I think it's nonsense … The composition is wonderful as it is, like that of Bruckner Ninth Symphony incomplete for other reasons.Schubert lived long enough to finish it, and he did not do it.Who are we to complete a work of, in this case, the one of the most sensitive, refined and original musicians in history? "