Oomm-tsss, oomm-tsss, Oomm-tsss, oomm-tsss... it's an AI beatbox

Nao Tokui – a visiting associate professor at Kyushu University in California and a CEO of Qosmo, an AI and music startup – has developed a neural-network-based system that collects about 20 seconds of any sound to produce a custom drum kit, and then automatically sequences rhythms using those utterances and noises. Any snippet of audio can be used as input, from your own voice to improvised percussion. In a video demo of the JavaScript-based code, Tokui gently slaps his cheek, and flicks a plastic bottle. The sounds are recorded by his computer's microphone, and fed into the software to generate a rhythm from the audio: Whatever's recorded by the code is automagically split and assigned to the instruments that make up the virtual drum kit, such as the kick drum, snare, hi hat, and tom-toms. After all this, the model strings together combinations of the kit's components into a sequence to produce a loop that you can bop your head to.