Google’s Chaotic ‘Blob Opera’ Maker Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Screenshot via Google Arts & Culture
Can’t go caroling this year? Here’s an even better idea: your very own opera. Of blobs.
Google’s Arts & Culture program is ending the year on a high note, quite literally, with a super fun machine learning experiment called Blob Opera. Created by artist David Li, the interactive tool lets you easily compose your own music—whether a symphony or utter hogwash—and have four colorful festive blobs sing it for you.
Let us tell you, these blobs can sing. According to Google, the model was trained on the voices of four opera singers—tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney—to produce dramatic, chaotic good music all the time. It’s worth noting that you can’t actually distinguish the singers’ real voices; the AI just learns what makes up opera singing from them and reproduces it in its own way.
Even if you’re not a musical person, the experiment will leave you amused and entertained anyhow. The music-making process itself is what makes Blob Opera so ridiculously good—simply shift the blobs up and down or back and forth to adjust their pitch and volume.
Blob Opera is designed to turn out great e-cards too. If you’d like to make a Christmas greeting card with familiar jingles, there’s an option to have the blobs sing classic holiday music while wearing Santa hats. Of course, it is recommended you take some creative liberties with the caroling and have the voices go rogue.
Internet users are thoroughly amused by the wacky experiment. “The internet’s peaked… no one will ever manage to make a better thing on the web,” one responded. “Day completely derailed,” said another.
If you’re still trying to accomplish something great this year, let it be this.
Blob Opera! 🎶 Professional opera singers helped a neural network learn what four opera voices sound like. https://t.co/qzE4AqSJk9
— Paul Irish (@paul_irish) December 15, 2020
Compose your own piece or wildly mess with a carol. 🥰 So good. pic.twitter.com/bOVfzkkOkK
The internet's peaked. We can all quit our jobs now.
— Cassie Evans (@cassiecodes) December 15, 2020
No one will ever manage to make a better thing on the web.https://t.co/0VIvhDIkFb
Your distraction of the day is #blobopera
— Scott Berkun (@berkun) December 15, 2020
It's exactly what it sounds like except cuter and more pleasant than you think. Plus a holiday filter (lower right).https://t.co/V5k1Lx3BcA
could use some #a11y love tho pic.twitter.com/q4oFIwUJNu
[via SlashGear and Google Keyword, cover image via Google Arts & Culture]
Also check out these recent news
