Still looking for that perfect present? Why not gift a festive song? Blob Opera is a new machine learning experiment by artist David Li that lets you create your own festive song inspired by Opera on Google Arts & Culture.

Guide the pitch and vowel sound of our four festive blobs who stand ready to transform your musical ideas (no matter how good or bad) into beautiful harmonies. Record your creation and share it with family & friends, especially the person who already seems to have everything — you can be sure this will be their first Blob Opera.

This experiment pays tribute to and explores the original musical instrument: the voice. We developed a machine learning model trained on the voices of four opera singers in order to create an engaging experiment for everyone, regardless of musical skills. Tenor, Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney recorded many hours of singing. In the experiment you don’t hear their voices, but rather the machine learning model’s understanding of what opera singing sounds like, based on what it learned from the opera singers.

The resulting experiment allows you to play Blob Opera, altering pitch & vowel sounds to create your own composition. The blobs respond and harmonise to your input in real time. But no worries if you’re feeling a bit too shy to compose: You can also have the Blobs put on a festive performance while you sit back and enjoy classics like “Jingle Bells” and “O Holy Night.”

The creative holiday fun doesn’t end there. Google Arts & Culture has also created holiday-themed virtual colouring books. Find them the next time you search on Google for winter holidays like "Hanukkah," "Christmas" and "Kwanzaa."

Or venture a bit farther afield with another machine learning experiment, “The Never-Ending Holiday.” These computer-generated, surrealist-inspired short videos use Google Maps and Street View data to offer mesmerizing explorations of France, Italy and Spain. With travel restrictions in place and winter keeping many of us indoors, they can take you on a journey to famous landmarks and distant shorelines. 

Evidence shows that culture can be calming, consoling and a source of comfort—for example studies at Harvard have shown creative activities like painting can have a positive effect on health and wellbeing. When lockdown began earlier this year, internationally acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma wanted to share some of the music that was giving him comfort amid the anxiety. So he recorded a performance of Dvořák’s “Going Home” on his phone and shared it on social media with the hashtag #songsofcomfort. Soon, people around the world were chiming in with their own recordings of comforting songs. Others started sharing poetry and art.

As Yo-Yo put it, if we have culture, “we have the resilience and we have the possibility of rebuilding no matter what comes our way, because we are sustaining one another and together we're stronger.” Explore the online exhibit on Google Arts & Culture starting today.

Art has always been a medium to convey complex subjects and address challenges we face. For many of us, the term “climate data” conjures up images of complicated graphs and charts, but artists are explaining it through a new lens. Today, on World Environment Day, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Google Arts & Culture Lab residency program announce Heartbeat of the Earth, a series of experimental artworks inspired by climate data. 

Five artists—Fabian Oefner, Cristina Tarquini, Laurie Frick, Pekka Niittyvirta, Timo Aho—used key findings from a landmark UN report and data from scientific institutions, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Organization, to create four interactive pieces of art about our climate. They’ve addressed the topics of declining ocean life, food consumption, melting glaciers and rising sea levels.

Acidifying Ocean

Digital visual artist Cristina Tarquini invites you to dive into our acidifying oceans using data from NOAA. Witness the effects of rising CO2 levels on our ocean: coral bleaching, fish disappearing, shells dissolving, jellyfish populations booming and garbage overpopulating the sea.

What We Eat

Have you ever wondered about the carbon footprint of your food? One-fourth of global climate change is caused by food production—that’s even more than the damage caused by transportation—so data artist Laurie Frick has created “What We Eat.” The work  examines the impact of individual foods on the environment using hand-drawn data visualisations, color coded and sized by CO2 output. 

Coastline Paradox

Discover the predicted sea level rise—and the number of people likely to be displaced—in more than 200 different locations between the years 2000 and 2300.  Timo Aho & Pekka Niittyvirta’s “Coastline Paradox” experiment, uses a map of the world and Google Street View to visualize the current and predicted global sea level rise.

Timelines 

The experimental photographer Fabian Oefner visualizes the shocking retreat of the Rhone and Trift glaciers in Switzerland over the last 140 years. In “Timelines,” Fabian traces their retreat for each year using digital coordinates by GLAMOS, a drone equipped with powerful LED lights, and long-exposure imagery of the drone’s flightpath.

We hope that Heartbeat of the Earth will help everyone learn more about the complex issues we’ll encounter due to a changing climate. If you want to keep exploring on World Environment Day, “Into the Deep” isan expedition of the Antarctic ocean, made in partnership with Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research. We also have a new video series celebrating nature in art created in cooperation with BTHVN2020.  

It seems that baking bread, cleaning one's cellar or brewing Kombucha have become popular hobbies while staying at home. But how about creating a work of art? “Do it” are DIY instructions shared by leading creatives you can easily do at home. Today we have created a new hub for ‘Do It’ on Arts & Culture —created in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries,Independent Curators International and Kaldor Public Art Projects. 

 It began as a project by the Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries, curator Hans Ulrich Obristand 12 artists in Paris in 1993, and now we’re adding new “do its” including ones shared by Virgil A. Abloh, Sumayya Vally from Counterspace Studio, and Arca. 

 More “do its” will be published weekly, you can also try others from the past 27 years: make a wish with Yoko Ono,invent book titles like the Raqs Media Collective or bake a delicious gratin guided by film director Agnes Varda. 

 We hope these instructions will help you release your inner artist—share your creations via  #DoItAroundTheWorld. To find out more about “do it” visit g.co/doitaroundtheworld or discover more on Google Arts & Culture—or download our free app for iOS or Android.

*Header image by Precious Okoyomon