16 December 2020, 14:39 | Updated: December 16, 2020, 2:59 PM
Google launches Blob Opera tool.
Image: Google Arts & Culture
Distraction from the day – four harmonious blobs going up and down to bring you joyful music this Christmas.
An interactive vocal quartet from Blobs – yes, Blobs – was created by Google.
Blob Opera is a wonderfully weird new tool with four colorful Blobs programmed to sing together in four-part harmony.
They can be dragged up and down to create beautiful music, the highest-voiced Blob always takes the melody while the bassier Blobs does the harmonious groundwork for their star soloist.
Hours will pass as these harmonious creatures are dragged up and down.
You can even freestyle with the Blobs in multiplayer mode – and have them sing Christmas carols such as ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Joy to the World’.
Unfortunately no ‘Carol of the Blobs’. I missed a trick there, Google.
Play Blob Opera here>
The voices are those of real opera singers, tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney, who recorded many hours of vocals for the experiment.
You don’t hear their actual voices in the tool, but rather the machine learning model’s understanding of what opera singing sounds like, based on what it learned from the four vocalists.
Read more: Um, Google now lets you search for music just by singing or whistling it>
“The experiment uses a neural network trained on the voices of a bass, tenor, soprano and mezzo-soprano to generate operatic singing in real time from simple movements on a user’s device,” reads a post on the blog. Google.
Google Arts & Culture describes the tool as “a fun way to create a festive opera with machine learning”.
For ‘Blob Opera’ we can thank the Google Arts & Culture Lab and creative coder David Li. It seems everyone is enjoying the distraction …