Honoring J.S. Bach with our first AI-powered Doodle
The J.S. Bach Google Doodle.
Lauren Hannah-Murphy
Program Manager, Google AI
Published Mar 21, 2019
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Ever wondered what Johann Sebastian Bach would sound like
if he rocked out? You can find out by exploring today’s AI-powered Google
Doodle, which honors Bach’s birthday and legacy as one of the greatest
composers of all time. A musician and composer during the Baroque period of the
18th century, Bach produced hundreds of compositions including cantatas,
concertos, suites and chorales. In today’s Doodle, you can create your own
melody, and through the magic of machine learning, the Doodle will harmonize
your melody in Bach’s style. You can also explore inside the Doodle to see how
the model Bach-ifys familiar tunes, or how your new collaboration might sound
in a more modern rock style.
Made in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google
PAIR teams, the Doodle is an interactive experience encouraging players to
compose a two measure melody of their choice. With the press of a button, the
Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s
signature music style.
Today’s Doodle is the result of a collaboration between
the Doodle, Magenta and PAIR teams at Google. The Magenta team aims to help
people make music and art using machine learning, and PAIR produces tools or
experiences to make machine learning enjoyable for everyone.
The first step in creating an AI-powered Doodle was
building a machine learning model to power it. Machine learning is the process
of teaching a computer to come up with its own answers by showing it a lot of
examples, instead of giving it a set of rules to follow (as is done in traditional
computer programming). Anna Huang, an AI Resident on Magenta, developed
Coconet, a model that can be used in a wide range of musical tasks—such as
harmonizing melodies, creating smooth transitions between disconnected
fragments of music and composing from scratch (check out more of these
technical details in today’s Magenta blog post).
Next, we personalized the model to match Bach’s musical
style. To do this, we trained Coconet on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations.
His chorales always have four voices: each carries their own melodic line,
creating a rich harmonic progression when played together. This concise
structure makes the melodic lines good training data for a machine learning
model. So when you create a melody of your own on the model in the Doodle, it
harmonizes that melody in Bach's specific style.
Beyond the artistic and machine learning elements of the
Doodle, we needed a lot of servers in order to make sure people around the
world could use the Doodle. Historically, machine learning has been run on
servers, which means that info is sent from a person’s computer to data
centers, and then the results are sent back to the computer. Using this same
approach for the Bach Doodle would have generated a lot of back-and-forth
traffic.
To make this work, we used PAIR’s TensorFlow.js, which
allows machine learning to happen entirely within an internet browser. However,
for cases where someone’s computer or device might not be fast enough to run
the Doodle using TensorFlow.js, the machine learning model is run on Google’s
new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a way of quickly handling machine learning
tasks in data centers. Today’s Doodle is the first one ever to use TPUs in this
way.
Head over to today’s Doodle and find out what your
collaboration with the famous composer sounds like!
Posted in: AI Doodles
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