Slime-Mold Art, Mysterious Neolithic Balls, and An AI Finishes Beethoven’s 10th Symphony

Bringing you oodles of reading in this week’s “Linkfest”

Beethoven Orchestra Bonn performs “Beethoven X — The AI Project”

Like a piece of implacable weekly clockwork, I present this Monday’s “Linkfest” — the finest fruits hand-plucked from the endless gardens of the Internet.

To begin …

1) 🎼 AI completes Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony

Beethoven was commissioned to write a 10th symphony, but died before he got very far. He left nothing more than a few musical sketches, like this one …

In 2019, a group of computer scientists, composers and music historians decided to see if they could get an AI to autocomplete Beethoven’s 10th.

Back then, music-completion AI wasn’t anywhere near as evolved as it is today — it could only generate a short phrase based on training data. So they had to do a ton of work, including preparing all of his music in a data-format suitable to train a neural net, then writing a bunch of heuristics that would guide the AI to produce material suitably Beethoven-like — on…