The most musical blobs you’ve ever met.
Screenshot / CNET
A quartet of opera signing blobs is at your disposal, courtesy of an interactive art and culture offering from Google and artist David Li called Blob Opera.
With Blob Opera, you have a set of four blobs – a bass, mezzo-soprano, soprano and tenor – whose pitch and vowel can be changed by moving them up or down, forward or back. Using machine learning, the blobs automatically harmonize with each other, and if you like what they sign, you can record your musical creation.
“This experiment pays tribute to and explores the original musical instrument: the voice,” Google said in a blog post on Tuesday. The blobs’ voices are modeled after real opera singers. What comes out of the blobs, however, is a machine learning interpretation of what opera sounds like.
If you can’t get your blobs to perform the way you want, you can flip a switch and listen to them sing Christmas carols like Jingle Bells and Silent Night.
You can also share your creation. Here’s an original from the Blob Opera that I took on the fly. To enjoy.