AI can create melodies that imitate the best songs of famous artists. But will these new tracks ever truly resonate with listeners? Perhaps those who attended the Latin American premiere of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in Mexico City in 2019—completed by artificial intelligence—can say more about this.
Completing Schubert’s Work with Artificial Intelligence
Before his death in 1828, Franz Schubert wrote half of the movements needed for the symphony and then left the work unfinished. Over 190 years later, the piece was completed using melodies generated by AI.
As experts told Sciencefocus, it wasn’t actually very difficult. Specialists trained the AI using Schubert’s melodies and tasked it with generating new ones similar to the training data. The resulting melodies were then combined with some original ideas. The musical result was performed by a symphony orchestra in Mexico.
Listeners in the hall experienced a range of emotions—from amazement to outrage and fear—when, after finishing Schubert’s original composition, the orchestra began performing its continuation created by artificial intelligence. It seemed they feared AI could create emotional symphonic music. These fears are understandable, as AI in this way can influence the emotions of thousands or millions of people, just as a human musician does.
How Does AI-Generated Music Affect Human Emotions?
The potential impact is hard to underestimate. A person who can manipulate others’ emotions on a large scale can cause unspeakable atrocities. Thus, it is frightening to imagine the power that could unfold on a mechanical precision scale if AI were allowed to manipulate emotions through music beyond accepted limits.
It is unsurprising that listeners coldly received the AI-completed continuation of Schubert’s famous work. However, during the performance, the atmosphere in the concert hall gradually shifted. By the finale, the mood changed from outrage to amazement.
Both positively and negatively, people reacted strongly to the symphonic debut of AI. Although most listeners did not believe that artificial intelligence could create something pleasant, they at least partially enjoyed the Unfinished Symphony.
Enjoyment of music means there is something in it that the listener connects with—a shared emotional perception with the creator. But in the case of a musical composition created by AI, what emotions can one connect to, since machines have no emotions yet? Hence the question arises: what meaning does music created without an emotional composer have?
The Meaning of Music in the Age of AI
The unsatisfactory answer is that music has no objective meaning. The composer decides how a piece sounds, but the listener decides what it means.
The meaning people assign to music depends on its context—how the work relates to other elements of their lives. Without context, music is like a game whose rules have been lost: a deliberately created product but without apparent benefit. Regardless of how it is created, music does not exist in a vacuum for the listener.
Therefore, AI-generated compositions will develop their own context, in which they can be as emotional as any musical style. Of course, these works will differ from those created by humans. Their rules will be different. AI will mix existing genres to create new ones and combine instruments that people would not have thought to combine.
However, it must be remembered that the context of music is part of the listener’s personality. Certain compositions are emotional to listeners because they have the context to appreciate those works.
That is why the answer to who infused emotion into the completed Unfinished Symphony—composer or AI—is only one: the listeners. They are the ones who create the emotions that link their lives to the music.
Can AI Manipulate People’s Emotions Through Music?
Yet most people do not ask the question that worries them most: Are human emotions really so simple that a robot can manipulate them?
Not yet, but someday it will be possible. If a modestly capable musical AI in 2019 could provoke outrage, fear, and even surprise in a Mexico City audience, it might have an even stronger effect on people’s emotional lives than they would like to admit.
And if artificial intelligence can truly manipulate human emotions even a little, it can do so so subtly that it makes one believe any ideas belong to people themselves. Therefore, the threat that AI might deprive us of free will, even without our awareness, does exist. Perhaps it is already happening.