Google's Instrument Playground is an experiment powered by artificial intelligence that can describe an instrument and start playing with it in seconds.

In this experiment, which resembles the looping capabilities of synthesizers and Apple's GarageBand, a 20-second generated clip is mapped to various keys using Google's MusicLM, which is given a virtual keyboard and also runs MusicFX.

AI music is a rapidly growing field, from tools like Suno, which can create entire songs from text prompts complete with vocals and lyrics, to Rightsify Hydra II, which learns with fully licensed music and even provides instrument stems.

Even Amazon's Alexa skill and Adobe are working on AI music-related tools that do everything from simple song generation to complete control of the output.

MusicLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on samples of musical instruments and built to turn text into music, trained in a similar way to AI image generators.

Like Suno and Meta's MusicGen and MusicFX, Instrument Playground can emulate hundreds of instruments from around the world, but unlike those tools, it specializes in manipulating instruments such as synthesizers.

It begins by generating a 20-second clip with the instrument as a prompt. Once this is generated, the song can be created using the keyboard (or the letter keys in the middle row of the laptop).

First announced late last year, the tool was created by Simon Dooley, Google's artist-in-residence. Says Doury, "The starting point for this experiment was to provide everyone with a playful interface based on Music LM that would inspire creativity and discovery of instruments around the world."

The global nature of the instruments is one of the most fun aspects of playing with this tool, especially mixing two such instruments.

The Instrument Playground is a bit more difficult to start using because it works with generated tracks. It does not work like a piano because it is synthesized based on the song, rather than mapping notes directly to the keys.

GoogleMusicFX experiments with some of the tool's individual instruments, and these instruments can be added to a complete AI-generated song.

I asked it to work on a spacy flute, and after a while it created a short clip of the flute playing a little ditty, and a keyboard to play with it.

You can also go into advanced mode and add up to four different instruments, loop elements of each sound, or create entire tracks from AI-generated samples.

On the surface, Google's Instrument Playground is a fun sandbox for playing with AI. Under the hood, however, there is a powerful AI music model that may one day lead to new forms of music production, as we have seen with MusicFX DJ Mode.

Imagine coming up with a new instrument that could never exist in reality (a glass string piano that can only be played in the vacuum of space) and being able to map it to a keyboard.

While there is controversy over the source of data for AI music tools and concern that allowing anyone to generate songs will have a greater impact on the value of music, the reality is that these tools are best used by musicians to create something they have never heard before It would seem that.