Have you seen today’s Doodle? Join us to celebrate J.S. Bach’s 334th birthday with the first AI-powered Google Doodle. You can create your own melody, and the machine learning model will harmonize it in Bach’s style.

Google is celebrating German composer Johann Sebastian Bach with its first-ever AI-powered Doodle. The company had three teams work together with instruments to put together the Doodle which allows people to harmonise with a cartoon version of Bach.

Today’s Google doodle is the first ever to be powered by GoogleAI! Pretty to fun to try out and see how AI and humans can be creative together. More on the ML model that powers the #BachDoodle.

Although he was known as an exceptional organist, Bach also understood how to build & repair the complex inner mechanisms of pipe organs, like the one depicted in today’s first ever AI-powered Google Doodle.

This google doodle is really fun. there’s a lot of comments about certain mistakes within it, but holy shit this world is a nightmare please just let fun things be fun

The first step in developing the Doodle? Creating 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. The model used in today’s Doodle was developed by Magenta Team AI Resident Anna Huang, who developed Coconet: a versatile model that can be used in a wide range of musical tasks—such as harmonizing melodies or composing from scratch.

Specifically, Coconet was trained on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations. His chorales always have four voices, each carrying their own melodic line, while creating a rich harmonic progression when played together. This concise structure made them good training data for a machine learning model.

These components, combined with art and engineering from the Doodle team, helped create what you see today.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in the small German town of Eisenach on this day in 1685 (under the old Julian calendar). He grew up in a large musical family: his father played multiple instruments and also worked as director of the town’s musicians. His eldest brother, also a musician, raised young Bach from the age of 10 after his father’s passing. Primarily known as an exceptional organist during his lifetime, Bach also understood how to build and repair the complex inner mechanisms of pipe organs (which are depicted in today’s interactive Doodle).

Composing music at a prolific pace (sometimes at the rate of one cantata per week!), Bach was a humble man who attributed his success to divine inspiration and a strict work ethic. He lived to see only a handful of his works published, but more than 1,000 that survived in manuscript form are now published and performed all over the world.

Bach’s reputation soared following the 19th century “Bach revival,” as the music world gained new appreciation for his innovative use of four-part harmony, modulations of key, and mastery of counterpoint and fugue. Perhaps the best measure of his legacy is his impact on other artists, ranging from classical to contemporary over the centuries.

Musicians weren’t the only ones affected by Bach’s music, however. After the Voyager 2 deep space probe launched, scientist and author Lewis Thomas suggested that the human race broadcast his music to the outermost reaches of the solar system. “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach,” he wrote. “We would be bragging, of course.”