While the festive season may be over, your boredom may not be. Artist David Li has created a machine learning experiment that allows you to create your own opera by clicking and dragging blobs. The process is quite simple - you drag your mouse up and down to control the pitch, and left and right to control the vowel sounds.
If you’re like me and have no musical skills whatsoever, don’t worry. The machine learning model has been trained to produce beautiful harmonies for you. Technically speaking, you aren’t hearing the artist’s voices; rather, you are hearing the ML model’s understanding of what opera sounds like based on the information it has learnt from the artists.
What’s impressive is the responsiveness of the blobs. Just as you’d expect from Google, the resulting sounds are produced in real time. Another highly entertaining aspect of this experiment is the animation. The position of their lips and tongues are almost true to the vowels they are producing. Furthermore, their actual bodies become taller or shorter based on the pitch.
The experiment provides a fun and interactive activity that is family friendly and is presented in a way that most can understand.
