Match any image with an imaginary soundscape using this AI-powered web app
Sound can be marvelously evocative; whisking us away from offices and homes to sit beside babbling streams in shady forests, or shiver on an exposed mountain side. But a new project by Japanese researchers takes advantage of this imaginative potential and combines it with AI to magical effect. The resulting web app — “Imaginary Soundscape” — uses machine learning to match any picture you upload with a suitable audio pairing.
Upload an Japanese woodcut of fishing boats, for example, and the system offers waves and water sounds; load an abstract painting of nightingales, and you’re given a garden soundscape of wind chimes and birds. Often the results are exactly what you’d expect, but more interesting is when the system picks up on...