Google Instrument Playground lets users make 20-second tune

Most may remember playing musical instruments when they were young. However, many forego the hobby as time passes, so it becomes difficult to find people who can play multiple. 

Fortunately, Google lets everyone try what it would be like to create music with several musical instruments with its latest experiment: Instrument Playground. 

Google Arts & Culture Lab worked with artist Simon Doury to develop a tool that lets users generate 20-second melodies with various instruments, such as guitars and drums. 

How does the Google Instrument Playground work?

The new artificial intelligence experiment is available at experiments.withgoogle.com. Then, enter “Instrument Playground” and then click Search.

READ: Google MusicLM creates songs from text

Select Instrument Playground to start the experiment. It will reveal a pale green webpage encouraging users to enter instruments after the phrase, “I want to play.”

Enter desired instruments and click Go. Consequently, it will go to a different page with the 20-second AI-made audio clip with various modifiers.

The user may click on the soundwave line to play specific parts of the clip. Also, Google Instrument Playground assigns keyboard number buttons to specific parts of the clip.

A user may press the number buttons to play the AI-generated sound sample like a piano. Moreover, these four options let users modify the tune:

1. Beat Mode slices the audio automatically to find the most interesting peaks. Each plays a different slice. You can change the length and location of the slice by dragging and dropping.
2. Pitch Mode picks one slice which is transposed per key. You can change the length and location of the slice by dragging and dropping.
3. Ambient Mode uses Granular Synthesis, a sound processing technique that involves chopping up a piece of audio into tiny samples. By playing the keys, you are navigating within the audio file and generating new sound textures. 
4. Advanced Mode lets users access the Sequencer and compose by adding up to four instruments. 

READ: Google and record labels want to monetize AI songs

Adjectives may likewise be added to have a specific melody. For example, a user may enter “a happy tune with guzheng and electric guitar.”

Guzheng is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument.

Google Instrument Playground uses MusicLM, a text-to-music AI program the search company announced in 2023. 

A previous Inquirer Tech article offers more information about this AI model. The experiment plays convincing tunes, but it may sometimes put instruments users didn’t include.