'Silicon symphony': Music composed by computer which monitored people's emotional response to Beethoven to be played in public for the first time tonight Piece was created by monitoring volunteers as they underwent MRI scans They were listening to second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony To be performed by a full chamber orchestra at Music Festival in Plymouth Maestro: A computer has created a remix of of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony which is to be played in public for the first time tonight It's enough to make Beethoven roll over in his grave. A computer programme that composes music by monitoring a person's emotional response to sounds, is to have one of its musical creations performed by a full chamber orchestra at a prestigious music festival tonight. Using its artificial intelligence, the silicon songsmith has produced a remix of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, which will be performed by the The Ten Tors Orchestra at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Plymouth. Researchers played the German composer's seminal piece to three test subjects as they underwent MRI scans while the programme monitored their brains for emotional indicators. Then using a programmed knowledge of music, it generated a new piece designed to create a similar emotional response. The project, which has been compared to IBM's Deep Blue chess computer, is being led by Dr Eduardo Miranda, a professor at Plymouth University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR), and Dr Slawomir Nasuto, a professor in the Cybernetics Research Group at the University of Reading. Dr Miranda told the Independent: 'We all know music affects mood but we don't really know how. We want to see if we can find musical melodies or rhythms which elicit specific moods. Which kind of musical features in composition elicit physical signatures in brain patterns? Our project is to build a new system for musical composition. The three volunteers - a ballerina, a Gulf War veteran and Dr Miranda himself - were chosen in an attempt to obtain a broad cross-section of brain types. The computer programme monitors people's emotional response to music as they are being subjected to an MRI scan. The composition is to be performed by a chamber orchestra at a prestigious music festival tonight While the ballerina's created mostly rhythmic deviations from the original piece, Dr Miranda's produced mostly harmonic deviations - possibly due to the fact he is also a composer. He added: 'With the classical ballerina there was a lot of activation around the motor cortex because she listens to music based on the kind of movement she can make. I deconstructed the 2nd Movement and reassembled and modified the rhythms and melodies based on information from the brain scans. Dr Miranda believes the programme has potential theraputic applications and could be used too treat depression without resorting to drugs. It could also be used in the entertainment industry and in advertising by inducing a desired emotion when presented alongside a particular product or service.