Blob Opera
Make A.I. just a bit more delightful...
2021 Webby Honoree - Apps & Software
2021 Webby Honoree - Entertainment
Blob Opera is the world’s first machine learning opera quartet powered by singing colorful blobs created by Google Arts & Culture. Artist David Li and the team developed a machine learning model trained on the voices of four opera singers. The recordings were fed into a convolutional neural network which learned how to reproduce each voice type based on what it heard. One neural network generates opera singing, while a second model was used to generate notes for the voices to harmonize with each other.
Deemed "the best thing on the web" - Blob Opera made a comeback during the pandemic - launching a world tour with expanded features and surprise in real life performance. Tune-Yards is the California–based music project of Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, and Merrill is well-known for her extraordinary, experimental vocals. To kick off the Blob tour - the Tune-Yards performed four songs with our Blob quartet, including crowd favorites like "Gangsta" and a special cover of "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer. David Li and VT Pro created a custom version of Blob Opera, introducing 24 new blobs to the experiment that were optimized for live performance. This allowed Tune-Yard’s to play individual characters via separate midi channels and musical elements.
To translate a beloved web experiment into a real life experience was the culmination of a variety of mediums and inputs - the concert truly blended art, technology, and music in a playful and wonderfully weird way.
The results: 550k+ people tuned in to watch the livestream, with another 11m+ view on Blob Opera viral content, 5.5 M users and counting, and over 146m organic social impressions.
Role: Executive Creative Producer