Freddie Mercury, a British singer and a lead vocalist for the rock band Queen, is regarded as a legend in rock music. Bohemian Rhapsody, a dramatic faux opera of the famous singer, has already crossed a billion views on YouTube, making it one of the most popular songs in the history of rock music.
This Google AI‘s new initiative is a joint effort by the Queen band, Google Creative Lab, and UMG (Universal Music Group) to build Freddiemeter, a system that helps measure how similar is your voice to Freddie Mercury.
FreddieMeter uses “new on-device machine learning models” and has been trained on Mercury’s vocals, as well as famous covers. Songs used in this system to sing along include four all-time famous “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Don’t Stop Me Now”, “Somebody To Love”, and “We Are The Champions”.
Technically, the voice of a user is evaluated in terms of timbre, pitch, and melody which are considered as the general traits used to describe a person’s voice in comparison to that of the renowned singer, according to Google. In the end, the FreddieMeter will give you a score between 0 to 100 as a measure of resemblance to the voice of a famous singer, which you can share on different social media platforms with hashtag #FreddieChallenge.
You can try the challenge yourself on YouTube, a part of Google.
The initiative will help fund the Mercury Phoenix Trust, which fights against HIV/AIDS-related causes worldwide. The members of Queen rock band founded the charity after Mercury’s death, and the FreddieMeter commemorates the band’s first gig, in November 1975.
In 1990, Freddie and his team members were awarded the Brit Award for the Outstanding Contribution to British Music, and one year after his death, Mercury was awarded it individually. Mercury was posthumously inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003, and the UK Music Hall of fame in 2004.
In 2005, Queen was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection from the British Academy of songwriters, authors, and composers. All these accolades and prizes testify the extraordinary talent and performance of the late singer Freddie Mercury.
You can play with other interesting Google AI experiment projects; visit ai.google.
Featured image: YouTube
