Google's Blob Opera is an amusing way to create festive holiday tunes

Google Blob Opera
Google Blob Opera (Image credit: Google)

What you need to know

  • Google has launched another creative AI experiment, Blob Opera.
  • Blob Opera uses ML to create festive opera-inspired sounds for you.
  • Google recorded hours of sound from four opera singers to create this tool.

Want to make your own Christmas song? You can do so with yet another of Google's creative AI offerings. Known as Blob Opera, it's a machine learning-powered tool that can transform your ideas into opera inspired sounds.

Here's how it looks in action.

Google's Arts and Culture team explained:

This experiment pays tribute to and explores the original musical instrument: the voice. We developed a machine learning model trained on the voices of four opera singers in order to create an engaging experiment for everyone, regardless of musical skills. [...] The resulting experiment allows you to play Blob Opera, altering pitch & vowel sounds to create your own composition.

Blob Opera is intended to be fun and something you can do to spice up the holiday. If you'd rather not do much work, Google says "The Blobs" can simply play an Opera rendition of classics like Jingle Bell.

The Arts and Culture theme also shared new holiday-themed virtual coloring books. You can find them if you Google "Christmas", "Kwanzaa" or other Winter holidays. Outside of Arts and Culture, Googe's Santa Tracker is back online, now boasting a masked up Santa and Mrs. Claus. Assistant can also now help you with Christmas queries like "what's going on in the north pole."

If you're interested in other creative ML projects from Google though, the company has recently shared two of note. One is Verse by Verse AI, a tool that's aimed at helping people channel their inner poet by emulating classical greats. The other turns your random doodles into 3D monsters. Neither are as Christmassy as this one, but all are just as cool.

Michael Allison