The Infinite Drum Machine
The Infinite Drum Machine is a browser-based AI experiment that organizes thousands of everyday sound clips by similarity and lets users create rhythmic beats by selecting and sequencing these sounds on a beat grid.
Pricing Model: Free
Category: Music & Audio Production Ai Tools
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/drum-machine/view/
Release Date: 06/09/2017
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The Infinite Drum Machine Features:

  • Massive library of everyday sound samples
  • AI clustering of sounds by similarity
  • Visual map (scatter plot) of sound points
  • Ability to select sound nodes and assign them to drum channels
  • Step sequencer interface for beat creation
  • Randomize/shuffle sound selection
  • Tempo control for playback
  • Filter and search across the sound map
  • Export or share composed beats (via link)
  • Open source code and experiment transparency

The Infinite Drum Machine Description:

The Infinite Drum Machine is a creative AI experiment from Google’s AI Experiments portfolio. It explores how machine learning can organize and categorize everyday audio samples and provides a playful interface for users to create beats. The project uses thousands of raw sound clips—from door slams and glass breaks to animal sounds and more—and arranges them in a visual 2D map based on their acoustic similarity. Users can browse this map, pick sounds, and assign them to drum groups (kick, snare, hi-hat, etc.) to build rhythmic sequences.

Behind the scenes, the experiment uses a technique called t-SNE to reduce high-dimensional audio fingerprint data into two dimensions, enabling the clustering of similar sounds near each other in the scatter plot. This means that sounds that “feel” similar (in timbre or acoustic texture) appear close together visually. Because no labels or descriptions are provided to the model, it learns purely from the audio features. This unsupervised approach allows interesting emergent groupings of sound categories.

Users interact via a web interface: they move or click points on the map to select sounds, then drag them into drum slots in a step-sequencer grid. You can set tempo, shuffle random sounds, or filter by sound neighborhoods. The sequencer plays loops of your arrangement so you can hear your beat in real time. The experience is both musical and exploratory—users often discover sounds they wouldn’t have imagined as percussive samples.

The experiment is fully free and open source, with the front-end code available in a GitHub archive.  Because it is experimental art, it is not a commercial product, but rather a showcase of how AI can reinterpret sound, creativity, and interaction. It demonstrates how machine learning can map perceptual similarity and let users explore audio in a spatial, intuitive way. The Infinite Drum Machine remains a vivid example of combining AI, sound, and visual interface design to spark musical creativity for both novices and experts alike.

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