What Is Blob Opera? Google's Singing Blobs Explained

Updated October 12, 2026

Blob Opera is a free Google Arts & Culture experiment where you conduct four colorful blobs that sing opera in real time. Drag a blob up or down to change its pitch and side to side to change its vowel, and the other three harmonize with you automatically. It was created by artist David Li with Google Arts & Culture and launched in December 2020.

It lives on our Brain Rot wheel, which is a compliment. You can open Blob Opera here and be making something that sounds like a real choir within ten seconds.

What is Blob Opera?

Blob Opera is a machine learning music toy. Four blobs stand on a stage, and each one is a different voice type: bass, tenor, mezzo-soprano and soprano. You move them around, and they sing.

The voices aren't recordings being played back. According to Google, the model was trained on 16 hours of singing by four opera singers: tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble and soprano Olivia Doutney. One model learned what opera singing sounds like, and another lets the blobs respond to you and harmonize in real time. So what you hear is the machine's take on opera, not the singers' own voices.

Who made Blob Opera?

Blob Opera was created by David Li, an artist in residence at Google Arts & Culture, working with the Google Arts & Culture team. Besides the four main singers, Ingunn Gyda Hrafnkelsdottir and John Holland-Avery are credited with additional singing. The idea is simple and kind of beautiful: celebrate the oldest instrument there is, the human voice, by letting anyone conduct it, no music lessons required.

How to use Blob Opera

1. Open the experiment and click through to the stage with the four blobs.
2. Grab a blob and drag it up or down to raise or lower its pitch.
3. Drag it forward or backward (side to side on the screen) to change the vowel it sings.
4. Listen to the others react. When you move one blob, the rest find harmonies around it, so even random dragging sounds surprisingly musical.
5. Record and share. There's a record option, so you can capture your performance and send it to friends or post it.

The festive mode and the world tour

Blob Opera launched right before the holidays, and it came with a Christmas surprise. Clicking the Christmas tree switched on a festive mode: Santa hats dropped onto the blobs, snow started falling, and you could pick holiday songs from a menu for the blobs to perform, including carols like "Jingle Bells" and "O Holy Night". Features like this can change over time, so if you don't see the tree, it may be seasonal.

There's also a tour option that lets you move the performance to different cities, including London, New York, Mexico City, Seoul, Cape Town and Paris, plus the blobs' home stage.

Why it's so addictive

• You can't really play it wrong. The harmonizing does the heavy lifting, so beginners sound good immediately.
• The blobs are adorable. They squish and stretch as you pull them around, which is genuinely funny.
• It rewards messing around. Push the soprano up as high as she goes and the whole thing turns dramatic in a way that never gets old.
• It's a great party trick. Put it on a big screen and hand someone the mouse.

Tips for better Blob Opera songs

• Move slowly. Smooth drags sound like singing; quick jerks sound like a choir falling down stairs.
• Change vowels on long notes. Sliding a held note between vowels gives it a real, expressive feel.
• Lead with one voice. Pick the soprano or tenor as your melody and let the others follow.
• Plan a short phrase before you record. Ten good seconds beats a minute of wandering.
• Use headphones. You'll hear how the four voices fit together much better.

Sites like Blob Opera

If you liked making music without knowing any music, these are all on our wheels:

Incredibox

Make beatbox tracks by dressing animated characters in different styles. Each outfit adds a sound to the mix.

Best for: building a full track in minutes

Adult Swim Choir

Control a choir of mouths. The wider they open, the louder they sing. Blob Opera's weirder cousin.

Best for: making something deeply strange

Typatone

Type words and every letter becomes a musical note.

Best for: turning your name into a song

Patatap

Every key on your keyboard triggers a sound and an animation.

Best for: keyboard mashing that sounds good

Pink Trombone

A simulator of the human mouth and vocal tract. Move the tongue and palate to make vowel sounds and odd noises.

Best for: understanding how voices work

Google Drum Machine

Another Google experiment: a simple, visual drum sequencer.

Best for: laying down a beat

For more like this, check our list of useless websites that are weirdly fun, our roundup of weird websites to visit when bored, and our explainer on Pointer Pointer.

Can't decide? Spin the Brain Rot wheel and let it pick for you.