Southern Fried Beethoven: an AI take on the Fifth Symphony | EarRelevant

Mark Gresham | 05 APR 2023

Artificial Intelligence-generated images have recently gone viral online, ranging from obviously fake to compellingly realistic, and have become a hot topic in the daily news and on social media.

It’s all part of the rapid rise of new artificial intelligence tools that make creating realistic images, audio, and videos cheaper and easier than ever, even though they are totally fake.

Many recent viral AI-generated images seen on social media have been created by a tool called Midjourney. Another popular tool, ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and tuned to perform well in chat-like conversations, is becoming more frequently used to author texts.

Although the spread of computer-generated media threatens to pollute the information ecosystem further, these AI tools may also enable new means of expressing creativity if used ethically.

Beethoven, comic book superhero.

I offer here two fun examples.

The lead image above, excerpted from the generated one on the right, was created by the Midjourney AI when I asked it to reference a familiar picture of Beethoven and reimagine him in a “Silver Age” comic book style.

The essay below came from a request to ChatGPT to analyze Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in the style of the late Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard.

It came out a little more stereotypical than even Grizzard’s actual writing, but points out what ChatGPT can do with its knowledge base — and it’s not the most advanced of OpenAI’s available artificial intelligence tools, by any means. But get yourself a glass of sweet iced tea, sit back and put your feet up, and give it a good read anyway:

• • •

MG: Please assess Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in the style of Lewis Grizzard.

AI: Well, bless your heart, y’all want me to assess Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5? I reckon I can give it a shot, but y’all gotta promise not to hold it against me if I don’t get too fancy with my words.

Now, when it comes to this here Symphony, I gotta say, it’s a real doozy. That opening riff is something else, ain’t it? You know the one I’m talking about — da da da dum! It’s like a punch in the gut, in a good way. And the rest of the piece ain’t no slouch either. Beethoven really knew how to put together a tune.

But here’s the thing — and don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of the classics — sometimes I feel like this kind of music is just a little too highfalutin for me. Like, do I really need to know all this music theory stuff to appreciate it? Can’t I just kick back and enjoy the sounds?

I reckon that’s the rub with ol’ Ludwig’s Fifth Symphony. It’s a masterpiece, no doubt about it. But sometimes I just wanna hear something that I can tap my foot to, you know? That said, if you’re into this kind of thing, you can’t go wrong with Symphony No. 5. It’s a classic for a reason, and even a good ol’ boy like me can appreciate that. ■

About the author:

Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. He began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.

Read more by Mark Gresham.