The blobs are back in town.
Google opened its I/O developer conference Tuesday with a performance that felt genuinely innovative, and actually fun, from the avant-garde vocal and electronica artist Tune-Yards — and Google's own Blob Opera.
The Blob Opera is an interactive Google Arts & Culture project from December 2020 that lets users create their own opera song, sung by animated blobs. Four opera singers spent hours in the studio recording operatic music. Their voices were assigned to four animated characters — called blobs — one each for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass, with the ability to harmonize and sing together due to the machine learning algorithm that powers the project. Users can move the blobs up, down, and around to create sounds and harmonize with one another, and ultimately record a song.
Google brought the blobs to the stage along with Tune-Yards to open the conference. Tune-Yards played on a round stage, surrounded by tall screens. The first hint of the blobs came when Tune-Yards lead singer Merrill Garbus began a call and response of nonsense sounds with a shadowy figure on the screen. Next, the blobs joined in for some classic Tune-Yards songs and provided the dramatic, operatic vocal accompaniment. In a blog post from Google on the collaboration, the singers who voiced the blobs expressed that "it was incredible to see a real artist working with the blobs as colleagues."
Google engineers worked with Tune-Yards to put together the performance. It was a customized, "massively optimized version" of the blob opera, using supercharged web browser capabilities to show off 16 blobs as musical accompanists.
Musical performances at tech events usually feel incongruous, and cringe-y —Remember Lana Del Rey at WWDC? But with an I/O so heavily focused on playful machine learning, it both made sense, and provided some much-needed entertainment — in the form of a belting blob.
Topics Artificial Intelligence Google Music
