[Learning from Awards] Pfizer’s Mozart Lost Symphonies

 

In this installment of award winners from prior years, I’d like to share with you Pfizer’s Mozart Lost Symphonies. This campaign won Bronze at Cannes Lions Health in 2021.

In the campaign, Pfizer imagines a world where Mozart did not die young and continued to produce music into his 80s. In reality, Mozart died at the age of 35. Although the exact cause of his death is still a matter of debate, many believe he died of an infection of some sort. So, what if modern medicine had been available at the time? What if there had been a cure for his illness? What other musical masterpieces would he have produced?

We will never know, but maybe we can take a guess at it, with the help of some technology. For the campaign, Pfizer, in collaboration with Shanghai agency F5 attempted to do just that with the help of AI and some very talented musicians. The AI was trained using his prior work and then asked to create 3 new piano pieces in his style. These piano pieces were transformed into symphonies by humans and then performed by the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert was performed in front of a live audience but also streamed online. Overall, the goal was to highlight the impact that therapeutics have beyond just curing disease and inspire people to pursue a career in healthcare.

AI is become somewhat of an overused term in recent years – it seems every product out there has AI now. Whether those are truly AI or not is a subject for another time, but I will say some of the things these technologies are capable of are rather impressive. Its not clear how much of the final composition for the concert was from the AI and how much was from the human musicians, but if you want to see for yourself what these technologies are capable of, I recommend looking up GPT-3, a language model created by OpenAI that is capable of producing writing, and Codex, which is a version of GPT-3 that can turn natural language into programming code. 

 

 

You can check out the entire Mozart’s Lost Symphonies concert on YouTube here. 

 

 

 

* 이 콘텐츠는 엔자임헬스에서 영문 컨설팅을 담당하고 있는 찰리 매니저가 작성해주고 있습니다. 메디컬 닥터 출신인 찰리 매니저는 다양한 국내외 헬스케어 프로젝트 컨설팅에 참여하면서 독자적으로 국내 닥터들의 영어 프레젠테이션, 논문 리뷰를 진행하는 '닥터 잉글리시' 프로그램을 운영 중에 있습니다.