Six years ago, I spent two months writing a piece of music.
An impossible idea
Before I started, all I had was a beautiful, completely unrealistic idea: I wanted to write a long symphonic work.
The problem was that I barely even knew what instruments were in an orchestra. So I did the only thing I could do—I listened to symphonies constantly, trying to train my ears and figure out orchestration by intuition alone.
In the back of my mind, I kept thinking: if I can write even one symphony in this lifetime, that alone would make my life feel complete.
So I carried my laptop everywhere. Whenever I had a spare moment, I opened it and worked. At night, after putting my child to sleep, I would sit back down at the computer and keep composing for a few more hours.
Little by little, short passages I actually liked began to appear. The hardest part, though, was getting from one section to the next. Those transitions burned through an absurd number of brain cells. More than once, I stayed up all night and still made no progress at all.
I still remember finishing the final transition and suddenly realizing: the whole piece was done.
It felt surreal. My first thought was basically: wait, is my life complete already?
In the end, it became a six-part orchestral tone poem, 8 minutes and 37 seconds long—far beyond anything I would have dared imagine before I started. For me, that counted as an epic-length work.
The gift that grew legs and ran away
After I posted it online, something unexpected happened: several amateur wind ensembles contacted me and asked whether they could perform it.
Of course they could.
So I spent another month turning the full orchestral score into a wind ensemble version. That adaptation dropped one section and shortened the piece to 7 minutes and 38 seconds. A few groups sent back very positive responses, and one of them even shared two rehearsal recordings.
And then the pandemic arrived.
Every performance plan disappeared.
I hadn?t been counting on too much in the first place, so the whole thing felt like one of those gifts from the sky that suddenly sprouts six legs and scurries off. Dreamlike, a little ridiculous, and almost funny.
For context: a wind ensemble, sometimes also called a concert band or military-style band, differs from an orchestra mainly in that it has no string section and instead leans much more heavily on winds.
Now that AI can compose too
Fast-forward six years, and AI-generated music is now real. That leaves me with mixed feelings.
Overall, composition may be one of the less socially destructive places for AI to intrude. A fake Mozart piece doesn?t seem likely to cause the same kind of damage as fake news. Compared with other forms of AI misuse, it almost feels neutral.
And for someone like me—an inefficient amateur who literally entered notes one by one with a mouse—AI ought to be on my side. In theory, it should be the perfect partner for making composition much faster and easier.
But then another question shows up: if I make something that way, who is it really for?
Would it mean anything if I said, ?The main ideas were mine; AI only helped polish it?? It doesn?t really feel convincing, even to me. And if someone else writes a piece using their own prompts, would that necessarily make their music less meaningful than my half-manual version?
Questions like these chip away at my enthusiasm for composing.
Sometimes I think my little life experiment with composition may simply remain frozen in that piece from six years ago.
If you happen to be wearing headphones and feel generous enough to lend me your ears, this is the work I made by clicking in every single note by mouse. I say that without shame—if anything, with a little pride. At the same time, I have to admit I worry about wasting 7 minutes and 38 seconds of your life.
This is the wind ensemble version, and I?ll leave the title unsaid for now. Maybe without a title, the images and story inside the music can come through more directly.
When AI composition tools become even better, will I feel the urge to write again?
Right now, I honestly can?t answer that.
But one thing I am fairly sure about: I probably won?t spend two whole months writing a single piece ever again.