The world’s first symphony with the participation of artificial intelligence was presented at the EEF by Petr Dranga and Sber

A new word in world classical music – a symphony with the participation of artificial intelligence – was presented on the Primorsky stage of the Mariinsky Theater. Maestro Petr Dranga created his new work, offering the place of the solo part to artificial intelligence. As the composer himself said in an interview, the neural network part was an improvisation, and he could not predict what the final result would be.

The symphony for symphony orchestra, which received the symbolic name “Cosmos,” is written in a classical structure and consists of four movements. In the first and second parts, the solo part was performed by virtuoso musicians from China. In them, the neural network model from Sber SymFormer controlled the expressiveness of the performance directly on stage using a virtual synthesizer. In the third and fourth parts, viewers heard real improvisation from a neural network in real time.

“I definitely believe that some trends, such as interaction with artificial intelligence, are something that we cannot cancel and something that awaits us all in the near future,” noted Petr Dranga at the final press conference. “And I would like the union with him to be for the good.” There are a million ways for this, and we presented one of them today. The idea was born to compose a symphony “Cosmos”, into which a neural network is integrated. This is in no way a competition, not a battle, but rather a tandem in which artificial intelligence thinks out and complements the written work in real time.

Thus, artificial intelligence became a full-fledged participant in the creative process and co-author of the composition. This unique project demonstrated advanced technologies and developments in the field of artificial intelligence created in Russia.

The chief technology expert of the Department of Experimental Machine Learning Systems of Sberbank, Alexey Minin, spoke about the features of this unique experiment.

-At Sberbank we pay a lot of attention to the topic of artificial intelligence development. This is one of the focus areas, the most high-potential and highly promising. We used our SymFormer neural network, to which we “showed” the creation of Peter Dranga: we further trained it based on the score. The uniqueness of today’s event lies in the fact that the neural network improvised in real time based on the information it received from the score.

An additional element of the performance was an art object symbolizing the neuromusician – a techno-matryoshka doll. The center of the musical installation, according to the organizers, was SberBoom, a smart speaker with the Salyut virtual assistant. The organizers asked not to applaud the audience during the pauses between parts, but the audience still could not resist.