Create your own Bach harmony via Google’s first AI-driven Doodle

To celebrate the birthday of composer Johann Sebastian Bach today, Google has created the first AI-powered Google Doodle that allows anyone to create their own Bach harmony directly within the Doodle on Google’s search page.

The Doodle is an interactive experience encouraging players to compose a two-measure melody of their choice – users can add notes, accidentals, change tempo and key. Then, with the press of a button, the Doodle uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style (or a Bach 80’s rock style hybrid if you happen to find a very special Easter egg in the Doodle…)

The machine learning engine behind today’s Doodle was trained by analysing 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonisations. His chorales always have four voices, each carrying their own melodic line while creating a rich harmonic progression when played together, and it was this concise structure that made the chorales good training data for a machine learning model.

The Bach Doodle is available today worldwide on Google.ie.