Tech News: Huawei's Unfinished Symphony

Forget about your R&B, hip-hop or stadium pop, robot composers are the future of music. Huawei, the Chinese tech goliath, has used AI from its Huawei Mate 20 Pro smartphone to complete the final two movements of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8.

The phone’s Neural Processing Unit analysed the timbre, pitch and metre of the existing first and second movements of the symphony, completed 197 years ago, and then generated the melody for the final, missing third and fourth movements. Lucas Cantor, an Emmy-award winning composer, arranged an orchestral score from the melody in the style of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8. Huawei – who could use a few musical distractions right now – then presented the Unfinished Symphony to an audience in London with a 66-piece orchestra.

If music is the food of love, play on Mate 20.