Imaginary soundscapes composed by AI

A Japanese group trained a deep learning algorithm to compose soundscapes for locations on Google Street View. Try it out for yourself.

For a stadium, it correctly concocted crowd noise from a ball game but also Gregorian chanting (because presumably it mistook the stadium’s dome for a church’s vaulted ceiling). A view outside the Notre Dame in Paris had seagulls and waves crashing…but if you turned around to look into the church, you could hear a faint choir in the background.

• artificial intelligence
• Google Street View
• video