Lo-Fi Player, a new project out of Google Magenta, wants to help people play around with music creation — no experience necessary. Lo-Fi Player is a pixelated, 2D virtual room that runs in a web browser. It lets you mix lo-fi hip hop tracks by clicking on different objects in the room, and it uses machine learning to give the tracks a little finesse.
Once you have clicked around on everything from the guitars to the window, plants and desk and generated sounds you like, you can share your Lo-Fi Player room with friends. If you click the radio or TV, you’ll trigger machine-learning models that produce a few new melodies, and you can click the green ceiling lamp to stop and start the music.
Lo-Fi Player was created by Google Magenta summer intern Vibert Thio. The Magenta team regularly develops deep learning algorithms that create songs, images and drawings.
“We chose Lo-Fi Hip Hop because it’s a popular genre with relatively simple music structure,” Thio wrote in a blog post. “This limited flexibility helps ensure that the music always makes sense. We’re able to create something more like a “music generating room” than a musical instrument or composition tool.”
As MIT Tech Review notes, Lo-Fi Player first launched as an interactive YouTube stream. That’s still live, and it allows players to change the music by entering commands in the chat window. Once you’ve played around with Lo-Fi Player, give the YouTube stream a try too.