Create Some Rocking Blob Opera with Google's Latest Experiment
Dec 20, 2020, 10:24 am EST December 19, 2020, 4:05 pm EST | 1 min read
Learning to compose amazing music in any genre takes decades of hard work, study, and creativity. But that's too much work. What if you could make an excellent opera right now by dragging around some blobs? Yes, blobs. Google's latest experiment turns you into a composer, and you don't even need to know musical theory.
Artist David Li worked with Google's Arts and Culture wing to create the Blob Opera. The process started with recording four opera singers and then feeding 16 hours of info to a machine-learning algorithm.
After that, the neural network could create an opera like sound with four pitch options: bass, tenor, mezzo-soprano, and soprano. From there, it was just a matter of creating an interface. Making music with the Blob Opera is simple. Drag a blob up and down to change notes and move up and down a scale. Drag them forward and back to switch between vowels (a, e, i, o, and u). The other blobs will automatically harmonize thanks to machine learning.
Introducing Blob Opera, an experiment I created for Google Arts & Culture: https://t.co/dfLnCXSR0R pic.twitter.com/UYbZH8jXE2
— David Li (@daviddotli) December 15, 2020
If you like, you can record your performance and share it with others. We created this one in just a few minutes. And if the idea of creating music still intimidates you, then you can let Google do the hard work for you. Turning the Christmas Tree slider on in the lower right-hand corner will give the blobs Santa hats and enable an option to have them sing Christmas Carols.
The whole thing is silly, but it's surprisingly fun and works very well. Knowing more about music theory will let you create complicated works of art. But you can create something pretty even without knowing the inner workings of composition. Give it a try today at Google's Arts and Culture site.
Create a Blob Opera
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