Infinite Drum Machine

The Infinite Drum Machine is a browser-based creative experiment, built by Kyle McDonald, Manny Tan, Yotam Mann, and collaborators at Google Creative Lab as part of Google's "A.I. Experiments" series. It takes thousands of everyday and orchestral sounds — including samples contributed by the Philharmonia Orchestra in London — and uses a machine-learning technique called t-SNE to arrange them on a large, color-coded map purely by acoustic similarity, without any manual tags or descriptions attached to the sounds beforehand. Visually similar clusters on the map correspond to sonically similar sounds, so a user can explore a "neighborhood" of related noises and drop them into a built-in drum sequencer to build a beat entirely out of non-musical audio, like clinking glasses or barking dogs. It's aimed at anyone curious about creative uses of machine learning or looking for an easy way to make music without instruments — students, educators, and casual visitors rather than professional musicians. The experience is optimized for the Chrome browser and works best on a phone held in portrait orientation, and its code is open-sourced on GitHub for developers who want to study or extend it. As a demo rather than a maintained product, it has no accounts, saving, or export features, and Google has not indicated ongoing development beyond the original release.