Everyone of us has a desire to create, but we don’t always have the idea how to do certain things.
Recently, David Li from Google created an online experiment which enabled everybody to create their own musical masterpiece at the same time putting a smile on many faces of Internet users, including mine.
This simple game enables you to compose beautiful harmonies without any knowledge or experience in the music field. You don’t have to play and instrument or know any theory, it’s built for everyone to enjoy.
The website is effortless to use. You basically drag the colorful blobs upwards or downwards to change the pitch of their voice and you drag to the sides to change the vowels which they are singing. You control one blob at the time and the others are following you and harmonizing with your melody.
To create such a great game, the developer David Li recorded 4 opera singers for 16h and he trained machine learning models which got to know how every one of them sounds like. That’s why we can hear their synthesized voices by AI, which sound very lifelike.
The harmonies however are built by analyzing big datasets of already known melodies. When the note of the blob is being chosen by you, the algorithm picks another one that matches the first, to create a pleasurable sound.
The professionals recorded for this experiment were Cristian Joel (tenor), Frederick Tong (bass), Joanna Gamble (mezzo‑soprano), and Olivia Doutney (soprano), but imagine you could record a sample of your own voice and play around using it as a base for the algorithm.
Such feature isn’t yet available in the game but I think that it could be a good plan for improvement and development of the experiment. What about expanding the library of voices available for the blobs, or even better, an option of recording your friends as other singers and jamming around in the virtual reality?
Bibliography:
Ling, Thomas. “The Hidden Genius of Blob Opera – and How It Could Get Even Smarter.” BBC Science Focus Magazine, 18 Dec. 2020, www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/blob-opera/.
Piper, Daniel. “Is Google’s Blob Opera the Best Thing on the Web?” Creative Bloq, Creative Bloq, 16 Dec. 2020, www.creativebloq.com/news/google-blob-opera.
Thier, Dave. “’Blob Opera’ Is Genuinely One Of The Best Games All Year.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 17 Dec. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2020/12/17/blob-opera-is-genuinely-one-of-the-best-games-all-year/?sh=354f7e02793a.