Can an LLM write a symphony?

The first thing I properly tested Astra on was a symphony, in roughly Romantic style.

The workflow:

• First I tried working on a piano concerto, giving it detailed instructions – pointing out what sounded bad up to individual notes, and having it plan out and write roughly 8-bar sections.
• After working our way through the first 32 or so bars, I told it to write a symphony – 4 movements, no interruptions from my side.
• It took roughly 4.5 hours for it to finish the piece, and then 2.5 to work on the sound, and create the video.

You can review the chat here, I recommend starting from the end.

Overall the jump in capabilities in different areas (see driving, robotics through painting, blender) feels roughly like GPT-2 to GPT-3 on text, so my guess is we get quasi-AGI on a much wider set of topics than now very soon.

The presentation (the video and the thumbnail) was decided on and generated by Astra without my intervention.

agheieff/symphony-no-1GitHub

The symphony was made on 8 September 2026.