Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera

15 Dec 20 - 11:43 PM (#4083670)
Subject: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: Stilly River Sage

Google Blob Opera

Let the dulcet tones of Google’s Blob Opera ring in the holiday season with machine learning offers an explanation.

Hark! The blobs sing!

Or at least, they do in Google’s latest machine learning experiment, the awe-inspiring Blob Opera, which will see a chorus of four adorable, colorful blobs serenade you with spine-tingling operatic music. Drag a blob up or down, and you’ll change what pitch they sing in; drag them from side to side, and you’ll change the vowel sound. Each blob will also harmonize with the others, in what can only be described as magical.

The Blob Opera just sounds beautiful, with soaring harmonies ringing out from each blob. Four actual opera singers — Christian Joel (tenor), Frederick Tong (bass), Joanna Gamble (mezzo-soprano), and Olivia Doutney (soprano) — recorded 16 hours of singing (Ingunn Gyda Hrafnkelsdottir and John Holland-Avery also contributed), but it’s not their actual voices you’re hearing when the blobs sing.

Rather, the team trained a machine learning model on those voice recordings. The blobs are singing what the algorithm “thinks” opera sounds like, based on what it learned through the training. An additional model works to enable the harmonizing.

It's fun to play with and beautiful to listen to.

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18 Dec 20 - 10:41 AM (#4083997)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: leeneia

I tried it, Stilly. I just dunno.

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18 Dec 20 - 11:02 AM (#4084004)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: Donuel

Play the xmas carol options after you fiddle with each blob.
The nonsense language is cute.

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18 Dec 20 - 11:22 AM (#4084008)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: cnd

Not too long ago a college near me had a machine learning poem maker that would hand out silly nonsense poems during finals season when you walked into the library. I'll have to see if I still have any

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18 Dec 20 - 11:43 AM (#4084011)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: Stilly River Sage

I think the staff at my library did that a half-dozen years ago or so. It was a thing.

Once you get the hang of the Blobs you can record your performance.

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19 Dec 20 - 02:29 PM (#4084164)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: Helen

Thanks Maggie. I had fun with that and sent the links to my session group friends.

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26 Mar 21 - 10:39 AM (#4099380)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: cnd

I found the poem I was talking about earlier, for anyone curious:

You relax deadly save ruled signed beyond unequaled offers.
Dear, you yak plus the approvals.
Koshering throughout, I am ex a lobster.
The discussion identified the monogamy.
You stew the dial.
A most visible limp bombs an realistic earthquake.
Cellar notwithstanding a firm sky!
Help, you lace beyond the friends...

A Poem by bookBot Poet April 24, 2018.

Suffice it to say that AI has some catching up to do on modern poets...

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26 Mar 21 - 12:16 PM (#4099397)
Subject: RE: Google Machine Learning: Blob Opera
From: GUEST,#

I once heard that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they will write the Complete Works of Shakespeare. However, the internet proves that's not true ;-)

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