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Comment by blue1 | Hacker News Reader

The sample at the end of the article seems to me at the same time Beethoven-like and meaningless. Made me think of the "screams of the damned" AI recreation of Frank Sinatra

<https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/09/deepfake-pop-m...>

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It feels like I'm hearing hints of past symphonies, but nothing new and it lacks overall coherence.

I've listened to (and occasionally played) a lot of really mediocre classical music, and this sounded exactly to me like "lesser composer tried to mimic Beethoven" and/or "sketches completed by his student". Or, alternately, "great composer phoned it in", of which Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" is a relevant example. The AI totally nailed the sound of Beethoven, the rhythms, harmonies, and orchestration... but my reaction is the same as yours. Fine for listening to in the background while I code, I guess.

On the other hand, I'm now very curious what similar experiments with other composers would sound like: Vivaldi, Brahms, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, John Williams.... the potential for AI orchestration is probably infinite.

Exactly what I thought. Like the experiment with drugged up spiders weaving borked webs.

This Beethoven has been smoking banana skins.

I actually had a really hard time determining where beat 1 is of each measure. It feels kind of meandering, like a touch of musical dysphasia.

The Grosse Fuge (German spelling: Große Fuge, also known in English as the Great Fugue or Grand Fugue), Op. 133, is a single-movement composition for string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven. An immense double fugue, it was universally condemned by contemporary music critics. A reviewer writing for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1826 described the fugue as "incomprehensible, like Chinese" and "a confusion of Babel".

A reviewer once gave a bad review to a good piece of work, therefore, anytime a bad review is given, the accompanying work must be good.

> it was universally condemned by contemporary music critics

Reading Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective: critical assaults on composers since Beethoven's time, entirely made up of contemporary condemnation of what seems every famous composer since (and including) Beethoven, I get the impression you could say this about any of their works.

(free to borrow) ebook: https://archive.org/details/lexiconofmusical00nico/page/42/m...

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