GabyAI can create melodies that imitate famous artists’ best songs. 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—might have something to say about this.
Completing Schubert’s Work with Artificial Intelligence
Franz Schubert wrote only half the movements before his death in 1828, leaving the symphony unfinished. More than 190 years later, the piece was completed using melodies generated by AI.
ScienceFocus reported that it wasn’t actually very difficult. Specialists trained the AI on 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 the orchestra finished Schubert’s original composition, it began performing the AI-generated continuation. The reaction suggested a fear that AI could produce emotionally powerful symphonic music. Those fears are understandable: AI used this way can influence the emotions of thousands or millions of people, just as a human musician can.
How Does AI-Generated Music Affect Human Emotions?
The potential impact is hard to overestimate. A person who can manipulate others’ emotions on a large scale can cause unspeakable atrocities. It’s frightening to imagine the power that could unfold with mechanical precision if AI were allowed to manipulate emotions through music beyond accepted limits.
It’s unsurprising that listeners initially reacted coolly to the AI-completed continuation of Schubert’s work. But during the performance the atmosphere in the concert hall shifted. By the finale, the mood had moved from outrage to amazement.
People reacted strongly—both positively and negatively—to the symphonic debut of AI. Although most listeners didn’t expect AI to create something pleasant, many still found parts of the Unfinished Symphony enjoyable.
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 an obvious purpose. 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 wouldn’t have thought to pair.
But remember that musical context comes from the listener. Certain compositions feel emotional to listeners because those listeners have the context to appreciate them.
That is why the answer to who infused emotion into the completed Unfinished Symphony—composer or AI—comes down to one answer: 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?
Most people don’t ask the question that worries them most: are human emotions really so simple that a robot could manipulate them?
Not yet, but someday it could 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 AI can manipulate human emotions even a little, it can do so so subtly that people believe the ideas are their own. Therefore, the threat that AI might erode our free will without our awareness exists. Perhaps it’s already happening.
