Composing a symphony involves many parts to harmonize and rules to follow. When the Beethoven project began in 2019, "Most AI available at the time couldn't continue an uncompleted piece of music beyond a few additional seconds," Elgammal explained in an article for The Conversation. Fortunately, Beethoven left more than 50 sketches behind that alluded to a complete picture of this symphony. Though the sketches can serve as excellent input for the AI, they are fragmentary and almost indecipherable due to his idiosyncratic handwriting. To truly capture the essence of Beethoven's composition, the team also brought on composers, musicologists, and musical historians, intending to teach the AI "both Beethoven's entire body of work and his creative process," Elgammal writes.

In the run-up to Ludwig van Beethoven's 250th birthday, a team of musicologists and programmers is using artificial intelligence to complete the composer's unfinished tenth symphony. The piece was started by Beethoven alongside his famous ninth, which includes the well-known Ode To Joy. But by the time the German composer died in 1827, there were only a few notes and drafts of the composition. The experiment risks failing to do justice to the beloved German composer. Tthe team said the first few months yielded results that sounded mechanical and repetitive.

Franz Schubert composed his Symphony No.8 in 1822, but never completed it, making only two movements along with an outline of a third. Nearly 200 years later, Huawei, Emmy-awarding composer Lucas Cantor, and artificial intelligence (A.I.) inside the Mate 20 Pro smartphone have done what the renowned composer didn't. They've finished the unfinished symphony. The project is a continued illustration of not only the power of Huawei's Kirin 980 processor and Dual-Neural Processing Unit (NPU) artificial intelligence accelerator, but also the potential for using A.I. in varied creative projects. We're familiar with A.I. modes on smartphone cameras, and Huawei has previously demonstrated the power and speed of its A.I. in a self-driving car, where a phone was used to identify and help avoid obstacles.