What you need to know
- The Centre Pompidou and Google Arts & Culture have teamed up to help visitors learn about synesthesia.
- The partnership has resulted in the development of a machine learning experiment that lets anyone "hear" a Vassily Kandinsky painting.
- To achieve Kandinsky's sound, the company partnered with music artists Antoine Bertin and NSDOS.
The new Sounds like Kandinsky project was created as an attempt to explain this phenomenon and allow virtual visitors to experience his art as close as possible to the way he once did. Contemporary music artists Antoine Bertin and NSDOS worked with Google Arts & Culture and Centre Pompidou on the project.
We trained Google's Transformer neural network, which was developed by the Google Magenta team, on music from Kandinsky's time and invited this machine to generate new scores to form a new perspective on what the painting may sound like from today's point of view. — Antoine Bertin
In addition to background on Kandinsky's life and work, this virtual exhibit lets you hear what Kandinsky might have heard when he created and viewed his masterpieces. You can zoom in and click on various parts of his Yellow Red Blue (1925) painting to get a sense of what different colors and textures sounded like in his head.
This isn't the first interactive exhibit for Google Arts & Culture. Over the Christmas holidays, Google allowed users to experience the funny Blob Opera, and the company continues to add new AR interactive creatures in its Arts & Culture app. Of course, one of our favorite features is the ability to add famous pieces of art as wallpaper on the best Chromebooks and best Android phones.
