“Tell him to do a work in the style of Shostakovich, with force, vivace, with metal and percussion instruments, with many dynamic contrasts,” says Rocío León, artistic subdelegate of the RTVE Orchestra and Choir. The petition is for an artificial intelligence that creates music from text. After a few minutes the machine returns a melody. Something very metallic begins to sound, then it goes into sudden silence and the tone changes: “It sounds like a village orchestra,” says César Peña, a member of the RTVE Innovation Laboratory. “Now she turns rock, she has understood the metal genre, you can turn it off now,” she adds. We heard for just a couple of minutes: “Do you have the essence of this man [Shostakovich]?”, asks Isabella Rocafull, also a member of the Lab a León, the artistic subdelegate. “No,” she answers without hesitation.
This request was just one more test of the second session to create with AI a work of a few minutes for symphony orchestra. For now, the result was bad. León then tries another path: “Tell him to see how Bach would write a piece for a symphony orchestra in D major for some action cartoons,” he asks. The result is also strident: “I don't like it, it doesn't have a clear structure, which is fundamental in Bach. There was a moment after the intro which was a mess. It seemed like it started well, but then it got tangled again,” says León.
The objective of the Lab and the RTVE Orchestra was to perform for the first time a symphonic piece created by artificial intelligence. EL PAÍS accompanied various stages of the process and spoke with several protagonists. The final two pieces were performed at the beginning of a concert already scheduled at the Monumental Theater on November 17. “For the first time in the history of this theater we are going to start with a small experiment, and in the end we will reveal the mystery,” arranger Borja Arias, who also directed the formation for those two pieces, told the audience. The first was transcribed as it had been created by the AI, the second was arranged to make more sense. At the end he revealed the trick: “The two works you just heard have been composed by artificial intelligence,” he said. The audience then uttered an “Oooohh” long. They were surprised by the novelty, but not in awe of the work of art.
Music with emojis
The RTVE Lab has documented the process called “Lab Orquesta” and they tell it both on television, radio and the web as well as in native pieces for their TikTok channel and other networks since this Tuesday. They looked at various tools to create music with AI. Only one supported elaborate text requests, which gave irregular results. There are others already available that only allow you to describe the request with labels or emojis, and that return something less elaborate.
AI has become a creative tool for texts and images since 2022, in tow of ChatGPT and other graphic tools such as Dall-E or Midjourney. Musicians have seen this process up close, but in their sector they have not experienced such a big explosion: “What we are going to ask of the machine is to construct, to the extent that it can and knows how, a musical composition,” he explained. Manuel Ventero, managing director of the Orchestra at the beginning of the process. “We sense that the result will be, in the worst case, very good,” he added.
But the complexity of classical music poses an even more complicated challenge for the machine: it is one thing to fill in the background of a YouTube video, another to create a work that is performed by dozens of musicians. The process showed that, for now, AI does not yet have the capabilities of Mozart or Bach, or even that of an applied student of composition: “It does very immature things,” says Arias. They also tried an artificial intelligence tool to transcribe music and it went wrong.
“This is more Indiana Jones”
The requests (or prompts) of those in charge of the orchestra and the RTVE Lab journalists were initially elaborate ideas, as is done for example with the illustrations. The proposals aspired for the machine to combine composers, genres and instruments. But the AI produced messy sounds, like a puzzle ungovernable. The first day of testing, last September on the stage of the Monumental Theater, already indicated that it was not going to be easy: “This is more Indiana Jones,” “there are influences here.” reggaetoneras”, “this is not a leak” or “he doesn't understand that language”, were some of the comments from that session.
After about 30 tests, in the end those in charge of the project settled on a very standard request to obtain an acceptable result: “A piece of music to be orchestrated for a symphony orchestra by a human composer.” The music was mediocre and left the composers alone: the AI will not take away their jobs, for now.
Human labor remains indispensable. The arranger Borja Arias received about 20 minutes of music created by AI collected in ten cuts. One transcribed it and another arranged it: “I have tried to understand what he wants to tell me.” [la máquina], I have taken few elements, because there were many,” he says. This is how Arias compares what he received from the machine with other arts: “Musical coherence is abstract and difficult to achieve. When you compose, you have to stick to one style. This piece had many inputs and it was not known where they came from. It was as if he started telling you a story about a protagonist who is a firefighter and then suddenly he kept telling you the story of a carpenter and then a woman florist and then a judge,” she explains.
The RTVE project provided that the musicians of the orchestra would not know who the author was until the end. They rehearsed and performed the play as if it were anonymous. Lab journalists interviewed members of the orchestra before they learned the truth. They smelled something strange, without knowing what: “The first work [creada por IA y solo transcrita] I didn't like it at all, but hey, it's also true that we've read it once,” said trumpeter Borja Antón after the first rehearsal. “Perhaps with a little more reading and work we can make it take on a little more shape, but it is a somewhat basic work.” When they told him who had composed the piece, he was little surprised: “Quite a few things fit me. The first work was very bad. There was no where to take the concept. In the second [arreglada por Arias] The melody is catchier, the structure was better done,” he added.
Useful for inspiration
To the artists' expert ears, it was obvious that there were things that were going wrong: “If it doesn't sound familiar to you, it might seem like a hodgepodge of movie music that then tries to be more classical and then contemporary, but without being innovative. It's a pastiche. It wasn't unpleasant to listen to, it's true. I imagined that the musicians were going to think it was by a mediocre composer,” says León, the artistic subdelegate.
For some reason, AI has a harder time crea
ting something musically meaningful for an orchestra: “There are things that artificial intelligence doesn't know are very difficult to play. There is a high C that stays there for a long time. That is impossible to do. Physically it is not possible. And then, there are no different planes, it's all in one go: you hear the melody with the harmony all together and you don't recognize anything,” says trumpeter Antón.
The difficulty of classical music does not have to be repeated in other styles. “To compose symphonic music, the truth is that you have a lot left,” says the arranger Arias. “It has left me quite calm, and it has also demonstrated the value that this type of music has due to its harmonic and contrapuntal complexity and a fairly profound message. With other styles, the AI is a little closer to achieving an optimal result. It leaves me calm that there is still room for improvement.”
This lack of complexity does not prevent it from also being a useful tool to inspire composers in their work or to imagine less sophisticated works, according to León: “Composers could take it into account as a little help and not face the blank page. To give an air of film composition, AI can serve as a filling musical moment, as an atmosphere. Not for an orchestra, which is something deeper and richer.”
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