This AI has synesthesia

This year, the DJ, artist, and Qosmo CEO Nao Tokui flipped the concept on its head. His project, Imaginary Soundscapes, is a convolutional neural network that hears sounds when it looks at images. Based on a given image, the software will choose from 15,000 sound files to find the "soundscape" that fits. First, he applied the software to Google StreetView to create an audio tour of the world, with AI-generated sounds to accompany any scene from StreetView, from echoing voices in Barcelona's Sagrada Familia cathedral to chirping birds on rural backroads. Viewers could "immerse themselves into the artificial soundscape'imagined' by our deep learning models," Tokui explained on Medium.