At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which ran last week in Las Vegas, artificial intelligence was inescapable.
Device manufacturers from around the world used the annual trade show to spotlight the AI capabilities they had integrated into products like cars, kids' toys, mirrors, vacuums and refrigerators, with novelty often trumping necessity.
The buzz over AI isn't limited to technophiles and companies hungry for the next big sales driver. As much reverence as it has for its centuries-old canon, the classical music world also feels the lure of the cutting-edge — not least because of how advancements like AI can enhance and reinvigorate that canon.
Case in point: Ludwig van Beethoven's unfinished Tenth Symphony. At the time of the composer's death in 1827, it existed only in a few dozen fragments and mentions that Beethoven himself made in correspondence. The prospect of ever holding a completed score was the stuff of fiction.
"We all feel, certainly as artists, a little threatened by it. So I thought that rather than hiding our head in the sand on this, we should confront this straight on."
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That elusive goal may have motivated the contemporary composer and musicologist Barry Cooper. In 1988, by drawing on Beethoven's musical sketches, he pieced together a hypothetical first movement for the symphony. Anything beyond that, he said at the time, involved too much conjecture.
But more than three decades later, thanks to interim advances in computational power and programming, Beethoven X: The AI Project sought to overcome that deficit by using AI to write speculative third and fourth movements. A team of musicians and scientists led by the composer Walter Werzowa fed Beethoven's body of work into an AI model and trained it to predict the unwritten notes.
Audiences will get a taste of those differently derived results at the Spokane Symphony's Masterworks concert this weekend when, as part of a larger all-Beethoven program, the orchestra performs Cooper's roughly 20-minute opening movement followed by the much shorter AI-generated scherzo.
According to Music Director James Lowe, the juxtaposition of human and computer renderings of a beloved composer's ideas is meant to tap into some of the ambivalence around AI.
"Obviously, artificial intelligence has become a huge topic in our culture. It's something that has been lurking around for years, but then all of a sudden it's here, it's arrived," he says. "And I think the way we react to it is of course varied. We all feel, certainly as artists, a little threatened by it. So I thought that rather than hiding our head in the sand on this, we should confront this straight on."
That sense of confrontation is evident in the concert's adversarial title, "Beethoven vs. AI." Allusions to some of the thornier aspects of AI are also sprinkled throughout the rest of the program, most notably in the overture to Creatures of Prometheus, the only full-length ballet that Beethoven wrote.
"Prometheus is the Greek god who stole fire from the gods to give to humans. He essentially provided a dangerous technology to humans that allowed us to evolve past a certain point of our development, and he was punished horribly for it. The not-so-coded message, really, is that technology is great, but fire burns as well as cooks," Lowe says.
Motifs from Creatures of Prometheus also crop up in another program piece, Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, titled "Eroica." Originally dedicated to Napoleon, whose despotic and imperial ambitions Beethoven later denounced, the work represents a monumental milestone in musical history. In terms of its structure and ideas, it's often cited as the threshold to the entire Romantic era.
"The music is so direct and so fresh, but it's still surprising. He does things that you really don't expect," Lowe says. "I mean, there's famously one very dissonant chord right in the middle that is so ahead of its time. It's just astonishing. And it really feels to me like this is Beethoven breaking the mold of what a symphony could do."
For Lowe, including an ambitious and wholly original work like Beethoven's Third was intended as a testament to the unique power of human creativity.
All the same, this Masterworks concert isn't meant to be an extended musical polemic against AI. Local technology firm IntelliTect is not only sponsoring the concert but has also created a high-tech software platform to engage the audience.
"Initially we just said, how can we do something a little interactive? And then we had this idea. What would it be like if you could actually be expressive with your device, and it had a list of emotive words that then could form a word cloud? So we built a thing to do that," says IntelliTect CEO Grant Erickson.
Their Audience Interactive System, or AIS, features a smartphone app that will ask the audience to describe their emotional response to the music during the concert. The collective answers will be displayed in real time with complementary AI-generated backdrops.
Erickson explains that the interactive experience should highlight a different side of AI. Amid valid concerns that it could ultimately supplant humankind altogether, there's also an argument to be made for AI as a catalyst and enabler of human creativity.
"There wasn't just some magic layout that popped out of nothing that wrote the rest of the pieces [for Beethoven's Tenth Symphony], right? There were people behind that who put an incredible amount of knowledge and design into that system to do the thing that it did," he says.
That, Lowe argues, is why Beethoven makes the perfect soundtrack to the fraught cultural conversation that underpins this concert.
"There's an internal conflict constantly in Beethoven. His manuscripts are full of crossings out and arrows and bits of torn paper and notes. He struggled with his material," he says.
"And I think that's why it's such great music. Because it reminds us as humans that it's not supposed to be easy. It's through our human engagement with our fallibilities, that's where our potential greatness lies."♦
Masterworks 4: Beethoven vs. AI • Sat, Jan. 18 at 7:30 pm and Sun, Jan. 19 at 3 pm • $24-$83 • The Fox Theater • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • foxtheaterspokane.org • 509-624-1200
