Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what could have been.
His notes teased at some magnificent reward, albeit one that seemed forever out of reach.
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Beethoven completed hisNinth Symphonyin 1824, which concludes with the timeless Ode to Joy.
A page of Beethovens notes for his planned 10th Symphony.
Beethoven House Museum, CC BY-SA
There have been some past attempts to reconstruct parts of Beethovens 10th Symphony.
Most famously, in 1988, musicologist Barry Cooper ventured to complete the first and second movements.
Yet the sparseness of Beethovens sketches made it impossible for symphony experts to go beyond that first movement.
The challenge seemed daunting.
To pull it off, AI would need to do something it had never done before.
But I said I would give it a shot.
The team also includedRobert Levin, a musicologist at Harvard University who also happens to be an incredible pianist.
Levinhad previously finisheda number of incomplete 18th-century works by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.
I told them how AI had successfully generated musicin the style of Bach.
However, this was only a harmonization of an inputted melody that sounded like Bach.
The task at hand eventually crystallized.
This was a tremendous challenge.
Most AI available at the time couldnt continue an uncompleted piece of music beyond a few additional seconds.
The AI side of the project my side found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks.
For example, the machine had to learn how Beethoven constructed the Fifth Symphonyout of a basic four-note motif.
The AI needed to learn how to bridge two sections of music together.
And it had to pull off these tasks in the way Beethoven might do so.
This meeting was the litmus test for determining whether AI could complete this project.
We printed musical scores that had been developed by AI and built off the sketches from Beethovens 10th.
We challenged the audience to determine where Beethovens phrases ended and where the AI extrapolation began.
A few days later, one of these AI-generated scores was played bya string quartet in a news conference.
Only those who intimately knew Beethovens sketches for the 10th Symphony could determine when the AI-generated parts came in.
The success of these tests told us we were on the right track.
But these were just a couple of minutes of music.
There was still much more work to do.
Ready for the world
At every point, Beethovens genius loomed, challenging us to do better.
As the project evolved, the AI did as well.
Over the ensuing 18 months, we constructed and orchestrated two entire movements of more than 20 minutes apiece.
This project would not have been possible without the expertise of human historians and musicians.
It took an immense amount of work and, yes, creative thinking to accomplish this goal.
