However, as many teachers and students have discovered in the last two years of on-and-off virtual school, music lessons during the pandemic have unearthed some pleasant surprises. As a music educator, I’d hazard that few school music teachers would opt to teach their students remotely. Whether teaching how to play a musical instrument, or how to sing, teachers rely on learners’ physical cues to help them progress - cues that are often obscured either by watching someone on a screen or listening through a microphone.

Learning to make music is a full mind-and-body activity. 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.This article by Robbie MacKay, Queen's University, Ontario originally appeared on the Conversation and is published here with permission. It was a customized, 'massively optimized version' of the blob opera, using supercharged web browser capabilities to show off 16 blobs as musical accompanists. Google engineers worked with Tune-Yards to put together the performance. 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.' Next, the blobs joined in for some classic Tune-Yards songs and provided the dramatic, operatic vocal accompaniment. 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. Tune-Yards played on a round stage, surrounded by tall screens. Google brought the blobs to the stage along with Tune-Yards to open the conference.

Users can move the blobs up, down, and around to create sounds and harmonize with one another, and ultimately record a song. 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.

Four opera singers spent hours in the studio recording operatic music. 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. 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 teaser for 'American Horror Story: NYC' is a bloody, kinky trip

Google blob blob opera