A Festive Interactive AI Choir That Sings by Virtually Pulling Up on Four Different Animated Blobs

David Li, thee talented animator behind the stretchy elastic Morty head and the interactive choir of singing lips, partnered with Google Arts & Culture to create a very festive interactive animated “Blob Opera”. In order to make the animated blobs sing, the viewer virtually pulls up on one of four different blobs that sing at different pitches depending on how high they are pulled. The red blob is a soprano, the green is a mezzo-soprano, the blue is a tenor, and the purple is a beautiful bass. The blobs can be pulled in any order to create a song that can be recorded.

Guide the pitch and vowel sound of our four festive blobs who stand ready to transform your musical ideas (no matter how good or bad) into beautiful harmonies. Record your creation and share it with family & friends, especially the person who already seems to have everything — you can be sure this will be their first Blob Opera.

Introducing Blob Opera, an experiment I created for Google Arts & Culture: https://t.co/dfLnCXSR0R pic.twitter.com/UYbZH8jXE2

— David Li (@daviddotli) December 15, 2020

The animation uses machine learning to mimic and model the voices of real opera singers.

Tenor, Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble, and soprano Olivia Doutney recorded many hours of singing. In the experiment, you don’t hear their voices, but rather the machine learning model’s understanding of what opera singing sounds like, based on what it learned from the opera singers.