A Christmas singalong like no other

Missing live music? Make some yourself, with another interactive musical thing from Google.

Google’s Blob Opera lets you conduct a quartet of singing blobs for instant festive joy – It’s Nice That
Whatever you’re doing right now, it can wait – because Blob Opera is probably the most fun you’ll have today. A new machine learning experiment by David Li for Google Arts & Culture, the online interactive instrument features four animated blob characters which you can conduct to create your own music.

Try it for yourself!

Blob Opera – Google Arts & Culture
Create your own opera inspired song with Blob Opera – no music skills required! A machine learning experiment by David Li in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

it’s all very silly, but you have to admit, they do make a wonderful sound. That’s due, no doubt, to some clever coding, but also to the skills of the real humans behind these machine-learned voices.

You can now create your own 4-part ‘Blob Opera‘ with this addictive Google app – Classic FM
The voices are those of real-life opera singers, tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney, who recorded many hours of singing 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.

It’s all great fun. And I hadn’t realised how extensive the Google Arts & Culture site is. Lots to play with, whilst we wait for all the real galleries and museums to get back to normal.