A lot of people were saying 'this is genius', 'this is so much fun', 'it's so creative'.' Everybody absolutely loved it, and I have been blown away by the response. 'I worried that everyone was going to be outraged at the techifying of opera and the arts, but I didn't encounter that at all. 'I wasn't sure what my friends and colleagues in the opera world might think,' she said. Speaking to The Telegraph, Ms Doutney, represented by the red blob, said she had at first been apprehensive about how the project would be received. However, users do not actually hear their voices but the machine-learning model's understanding of what opera singing sounds like, based on what it learnt from them. They were asked to sing parts from classic Italian operas including La bohème and La traviata as well as to simply hold notes at different pitches. Tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney recorded 16 hours of singing at a studio in Hackney, London, in November.

The company developed a machine-learning model trained on the voices of four opera singers in order to 'create an interactive experiment anyone can enjoy, regardless of musical skills,' it said. 'This experiment pays tribute to and explores the original musical instrument – the voice,' says Google, whose Arts and Culture Lab collaborated with creative coder David Li on the project. Users can drag them up and down to change pitch, or forwards and backwards for different vowel sounds.Īnother Artificial Intelligence model enables the blobs to respond to and harmonise your input in real time, and the project has been hailed as 'genius', 'creative' and 'great fun'.

Each has a different voice type – bass, tenor, mezzo-soprano and soprano. Now, through the use of Artificial Intelligence and the voices of four trained opera singers, children even younger than the writer of The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute can embark on operatic adventures of their own thanks to a new Google project called Blob Opera.ĭesigned for people of all ages regardless of musical ability, it allows users to create operatic masterpieces by clicking and dragging four comically-formed coloured blobs. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first symphony at the age of eight, he was hailed as a 'wunderkind' – a child prodigy.

Google blob blob opera