Google celebrates Johann Sebastian Bach's birth anniversary with first ever AI-powered doodle

NEW DELHI: Google Doodle on Friday celebrated the birth anniversary of renowned German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach with its first ever AI-powered doodle.

Bach was born in a small German town of Eisenach in 1685. 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).


Bach could compose music at a prolific pace (sometimes at the rate of one cantata per week!). Google Doodle in its note on Bach said,"He 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. But musicians weren’t the only ones affected by Bach’s music.

After the Voyager 2 deep space probe launched, scientist and author Lewis Thomas suggested that the human race broadcast its 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.”

Explaining the first ever AI-powered doodle, Google said that it made it in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams.

The Doodle gives an interactive experience encouraging players to compose a two measure melody of their choice. With the press of a button, the Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style.

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.

Today's model behind the Google Doodle was trained on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations to harmonize the custom melody that users create.

In another Doodle first, the Doodle is also served with Google’s new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a way of quickly handling machine learning tasks in data centers. The doodle facilitates machine learning within a web browser. Generally such applications run utilizing tons of servers, as machine learning traditionally does.