SCHUBERT and ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was one of the greatest Austrian composers of the Romantic period. Despite having lived only 31 years, he was very prolific in terms of musical masterpieces. Among the dozens of sonatas, piano compositions, string quartets, chamber compositions, sacred, vocal and opera music, his ten symphonies stand out, of which the Symphony No. 8 in Si minor (D 759 ) remained “Unvollendete”, that is partially “Unfinished” of the third movement and completely missing the fourth.

Over the last 197 years, many famous artists have measured themselves in the completion of the symphony, obtaining only rarely satisfactory results.

A well-known Chinese company, one of the world leaders in the mobile telecommunications market, wanted to put its artificial intelligence systems and algorithms to the test, exploring the fascinating world of classical music.

The technicians of that company have been training their algorithm for weeks, making them analyze, step by step, the stamp, the tone and the meter of the first two movements and part of the third. In this way, the system has obtained enough data to attempt the construction of the missing movements. The elaborations were carried out through the use of processors, equipped with double neural processing units, which produced a series of possible melodies. These melodies, selected and transformed by a well-known Brazilian composer, formed the missing parts of the famous symphony.

Therefore the collaboration between man and artificial intelligence, at the center of this machine learning project, allowed a total reconstruction of the “Unfinished” Symphony, which was also performed in London by some prestigious symphony orchestras (English Session Orchestra and Philarmonia Orchestra).

The completion of this symphony, net of the musicologists’ estimation of the opportunity and the need to end this work of art, must be seen as evidence of an unavoidable condition: the collaboration between man and technology can lead to winning much wider challenges than pure automation and production optimization.

ACTION ICT is a young, dynamic and innovative IT company. It operates, both nationally and internationally, offering professional skills and design solutions in the ICT field to medium and large businesses. Our highly skilled know-how is housed in three expertise specific departments: ACTION DATA (Big Data and Analytics), ACTION APP (Web & Mobile Application) and ACTION IOT (Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Robotics).