December 16, 2020, 2:39 pm | Updated: December 16, 2020, 2:59 PM
Google launches the Blob Opera tool.
Image: Google Arts & Culture
Distraction of the day: four harmonious tones, which come out and go down to offer you cheerful music this Christmas.
Google has created an interactive vocal quartet of Blobs (yes, Blobs).
‘Blob Opera’ is a wonderfully weird new tool starring four colorful Blobs that have been programmed to sing together in four-part harmony.
They can be dragged up and down to make beautiful music, the Blob with the highest voice always takes the melody while the lowest Blobs make the harmonious bases for their star soloist.
Hours will be reduced, dragging these harmonious creatures up and down.
You can even play free games with Blobs in multiplayer mode and get them to sing carols, such as “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World.”
There is no “Carol of the Blobs,” unfortunately. I missed a trick, Google.
Play Blob Opera here>
The voices are those of real-life opera singers tenor Christian Joel, bassist Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney, who recorded many hours of singing for the experiment.
Don’t listen to their real voices in the tool, but rather the understanding of the machine learning model of how opera singing sounds, based on what you learned from the four vocalists.
Read more: Google now lets you search for music just by singing or whistling>
“The experiment uses a neural network trained in the voices of a bass, tenor, soprano and mezzo-soprano to generate real-time opera singing from simple movements on a user’s device,” says a post on the blog Google.
Google Arts & Culture describes the tool as “a fun way to create a festive opera through machine learning.”
For “Blob Opera,” we can thank the Google Arts & Culture Lab and creative coder David Li. It seems like everyone has enjoyed the distraction …