In a concert hall in Switzerland, an audience sat in anticipation to listen to a version of Beethoven's Tenth Symphony for the first time.

The symphony, which the German composer never finished, was only scraps of notes when he died.

Some composers have tried to string together a version of the symphony since then. But now, artificial intelligence has given it a shot.

The four-minute extract created has been called BeethovANN Symphony 10.1. The ANN is a reference to the artificial neural network that created it.

The program was designed by Florian Colombo, who fed it Beethoven's 16 string quartets to help it learn Beethoven's style, so it would be able to fill in the gaps of his notes.

The resulting piece was then printed out just hours before the performance by the Nexus orchestra at a Lausanne concert hall.

"The idea is to just push a button to produce a complete musical score for an entire symphonic orchestra completely without intervention," Colombo told AFP.

However, he added, this was not supposed to remove humans from the creative process. But instead, it could be a new tool to help people compose music in the future.

Cover image: The designer of the computer program and the conductor of the orchestra sitting in front of a generated music score. /AFP/ Fabrice Coffrini 

Video editor: Natália Luz