Telekom turns to AI to complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony

Legendary music composer Ludwig van Beethoven composed nine symphonies and began working on his 10th Symphony shortly before he died in 1827. Now, close to 200 years later, German telecoms giant Telekom created a team of international musicologists and artificial intelligence (AI) experts to create a possible completed version of Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony with the help of AI.

Led by Dr Matthias Röder, managing director at the Karajan Institute, the group co-developed a “Beethoven AI”, leveraging algorithms for voice processing to help teach the AI to mimic Beethoven’s style based on the composer’s “style” and other composers who inspired him, such as Johann Sebastian Bach.

The AI generated pieces of music, building on the existing fragments of the 10th Symphony to build a complete symphony analysed by the musicologists including Professor Christine Siegert, head of the Beethoven-Haus research department, before its release.