[whistling noises playing]
[high squeak plays] Huang: Oh, wow.
[low buzzing noise]
[flute-like warbling]
Mija: It sounds like something in the jungle.
[high-pitched squeak] [minor string music]
[low note]
Huang: [laughs]
Taylor: It sounds like a dinosaur.
[upbeat music]
Hantrakul: Tone transfer is a technology
developed by the Magenta team and Google AI that allows you
to deconstruct sound into Play-Doh
and enables you to mold it
into something else.
So if you took the sound of birds chirping...
[high twittering chirps]
Or the sound of you singing...
Garzón-Montano singing: Ooh.
Hantrakul: It can remold that input
into the sound of the violin.
[violin trilling]
We do this by training a machine learning model
to distill what makes an instrument sound like that particular instrument.
[plucking on guitar]
Garzón-Montano: Whatever would that sound like?
[flute playing to earlier tune]
That's beautiful.
The way it picks up pitch is insane, right?
Hantrakul: It enables a whole new class of AI-powered audio synthesis
that was never possible before.
[low electronic music]
Huang: I think the thing that stands out
the most to me is...
all of the nuances of the sound
that make it so much more real than working with a sample.
[low electronic music]
Oh, my God! [laughs]
Whoa. It gives you a lot of surprises.
I put this through.
[voices scatting in harmony]
So that sounds like this.
[radio play-like music]
So cool.
I like that little squeal that it added in.
[laughs] I guess it took a breath of mine
and turned it into, like, a... [makes sharp noise]
[upbeat music]
Mija: Recently, I became interested in using actual organic instruments,
and that's helps me a lot
in the songwriting area of it.
[simple repeating pattern on keyboard]
All right, let's hear what this sounds like.
[repeating pattern on violin]
That's really cool.
I'm excited by not knowing
what could come out of it.
[high squeal]
[laughs] That was really cute.
[repeating synth pattern playing]
Taylor: Let's see what that sounds like.
[energetic flute music]
I love the breath on that.
I think the--the unique sounds that you can get out of this
with just, you know, the things you have already in your studio--
it just opens up a whole other realm.
[low resounding notes]
Let's import that craziness and see what happens.
[dramatic violin notes]
I'm definitely gonna use that on the next project I do.
Tems: When I record the sounds,
they all start with vocals.
[singing]
And then...
[trumpet playing]
Yeah.
Just the fact that I could literally just sit down and, like,
vocalize the exact thing,
and then it comes out so great-- that is iconic.
Hantrakul: How are you going to excite the model to do something weird?
You can sing into it, and you bang on some pots,
and you have a cat meow in the background.
That's a lot of inspiration for the model to work with,
and I feel like that's where the magic of Tone Transfer happens.
[percussive music]