Author Archives: Alexander Chen

It’s Music Week on Inside Guide

This summer is a weird one. The season known for long days, beaches and cross-country road trips has moved indoors, where a lot of us are spending more time hanging out at home with our families. In this alt-version of summer, people are searching for new ways to spend their time—and we’d like to help.

Since 2009, we’ve been building a series of small applications that test the limits of what’s possible using new web and mobile technologies. We call them “Experiments,” and we built them to challenge ourselves, inspire the broader developer community and help everyone have the chance to learn, investigate their universe and have a little fun.

We’ve decided to bring together some of our favorite experiments, games and activities in the newly-launched Inside Guide—which is organized by themes like Art, Nature, Culture and this week’s focus, Music. You can explore how music works with the Chrome Music Lab. Then take it to the next level and make music just by moving your body with Body Synth, or invite your friends to play live music with you on the web with the Shared Piano—one of our favorites.

Shared Piano is a new tool for remote music teaching and collaboration that lets you play together live. You can play on MIDI or computer keyboards with up to 10 people at once. You don’t need to login or install anything. Just send a link and start playing together. We’ve gotten great feedback from music teachers and friends using it to play music together, and we hope to continue evolving it based on feedback.

In the coming weeks we’ll be highlighting more experiments as well as a few ideas on how to use them.

Play word guessing games with the machine

Quick Draw is an experiment where you are given a word like “snowflake,” “swan” or “bear” and asked to sketch it. A neural network powered by machine learning will then try to guess what you’re drawing. Think Pictionary on game night if one of your friends was a computer. Of course, it doesn’t always work. But the more you play with it, the more it will learn.

Text like an (ancient) Egyptian

For centuries, from epigraphy pioneer Georg Fabricius to The Bangles, hieroglyphics have prodded our curiosity. We thought we’d take a swing at decoding them. Check out Fabricius, a new Lab Experiment from Google Arts & Culture that uses machine learning to help experts decode the stories of ancient Egypt. Today, you can use this technology to send your friends coded messages in hieroglyphs, the emojis of ancient Egypt.

Take a virtual vacation to Mars

The Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, and today you can take that trip through an immersive web experience called Access Mars. Access Mars features some of the most important locations from the mission, key points of interest, and narration from NASA JPL Mission Scientist Katie Stack. Start exploring Mars today.

These are just a few of the experiments, activities and games you’ll find in the Inside Guide. Since the pandemic started, we’ve noticed a major uptick in traffic from people looking for ways to learn about the world and have a little fun while they’re staying home. They’re learning more about 100 historic American women through Notable Women (and seeing them on U.S. currency), and joining friends at Puzzle Party, an experiment which lets you reconstruct some of the world’s greatest works, from Japanese master Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa to Andy Warhol’s portrait of Gracy Kelly.

Check out these experiments at g.co/insideguide.

Simple music-making for everyone

We started Chrome Music Lab to make learning music more accessible to everyone through fun, hands-on experiments. And we’ve loved hearing from teachers who have been using it in exciting ways, like exploring music and its connections to science, math, art, dance, and more.


For this year’s Music in Our Schools Month, we’ve added a new experiment to the website called Song Maker. It’s a simple way for anyone to make a song, then share it with a link—no need to log in or make an account. Anyone can instantly hear what you made, and even riff on it to make their own song. It lives on the web, so you don’t need to install any apps to try it. And, it works across devices—phones, tablets, computers.

Check it out here and have fun making some music.

Step inside of music

What if you could step inside your favorite song and get a closer look at how music is made? That’s the idea behind our new interactive experiment Inside Music.

The project is a collaboration with the popular podcast Song Exploder and some of our favorite artists across different genres—Phoenix, Perfume Genius, Natalia Lafourcade, Ibeyi, Alarm Will Sound, and Clipping. The experiment lets you explore layers of music all around you, using spatial audio to understand how a piece of music is composed. You can even turn layers on and off, letting you hear the individual pieces of a song in a new way.

It’s built using technology called WebVR, which lets you open it in your web browser, without installing any apps. You can try it on a virtual reality headset, phone or laptop. And we’ve made the code open-source so that people who make music can create new interactive experiments.

Watch the video above to learn more, and check it out at g.co/insidemusic.

Step inside of music

What if you could step inside your favorite song and get a closer look at how music is made? That’s the idea behind our new interactive experiment Inside Music.

The project is a collaboration with the popular podcast Song Exploder and some of our favorite artists across different genres—Phoenix, Perfume Genius, Natalia Lafourcade, Ibeyi, Alarm Will Sound, and Clipping. The experiment lets you explore layers of music all around you, using spatial audio to understand how a piece of music is composed. You can even turn layers on and off, letting you hear the individual pieces of a song in a new way.

Song Exploder Presents Inside Music

It’s built using technology called WebVR, which lets you open it in your web browser, without installing any apps. You can try it on a virtual reality headset, phone or laptop. And we’ve made the code open-source so that people who make music can create new interactive experiments.

Watch the video above to learn more, and check it out at g.co/insidemusic.

Source: Google Chrome


Step inside of music

What if you could step inside your favorite song and get a closer look at how music is made? That’s the idea behind our new interactive experiment Inside Music.

The project is a collaboration with the popular podcast Song Exploder and some of our favorite artists across different genres—Phoenix, Perfume Genius, Natalia Lafourcade, Ibeyi, Alarm Will Sound, and Clipping. The experiment lets you explore layers of music all around you, using spatial audio to understand how a piece of music is composed. You can even turn layers on and off, letting you hear the individual pieces of a song in a new way.

Song Exploder Presents Inside Music

It’s built using technology called WebVR, which lets you open it in your web browser, without installing any apps. You can try it on a virtual reality headset, phone or laptop. And we’ve made the code open-source so that people who make music can create new interactive experiments.

Watch the video above to learn more, and check it out at g.co/insidemusic.

Source: Google Chrome


Play a duet with a computer, through machine learning

Technology can inspire people to be creative in new ways. Magenta, an open-source project we launched last year, aims to do that by giving developers tools to explore music using neural networks.

To help show what’s possible with Magenta, we’ve created an interactive experiment called A.I. Duet, which lets you play a duet with the computer. Just play some notes, and the computer will respond to your melody. You don’t even have to know how to play piano—it’s fun to just press some keys and listen to what comes back. We hope it inspires you—whether you’re a developer or musician, or just curious—to imagine how technology can help creative ideas come to life. Watch our video above to learn more, or just start playing with it.

Play a duet with a computer, through machine learning

Technology can inspire people to be creative in new ways. Magenta, an open-source project we launched last year, aims to do that by giving developers tools to explore music using neural networks.

To help show what’s possible with Magenta, we’ve created an interactive experiment called A.I. Duet, which lets you play a duet with the computer. Just play some notes, and the computer will respond to your melody. You don’t even have to know how to play piano—it’s fun to just press some keys and listen to what comes back. We hope it inspires you—whether you’re a developer or musician, or just curious—to imagine how technology can help creative ideas come to life. Watch our video above to learn more, or just start playing with it.

Play a duet with a computer, through machine learning

Technology can inspire people to be creative in new ways. Magenta, an open-source project we launched last year, aims to do that by giving developers tools to explore music using neural networks.

To help show what’s possible with Magenta, we’ve created an interactive experiment called A.I. Duet, which lets you play a duet with the computer. Just play some notes, and the computer will respond to your melody. You don’t even have to know how to play piano—it’s fun to just press some keys and listen to what comes back. We hope it inspires you—whether you’re a developer or musician, or just curious—to imagine how technology can help creative ideas come to life. Watch our video above to learn more, or just start playing with it.