Choir

Choir is a browser-based musical experiment created by interactive artist David Li for Adult Swim in December 2018, with audio by Christian Heinrichs. Instead of a keyboard or microphone, it gives you four disembodied mouths. You control the front one by pulling its lower lip.

David Li trained a neural network on choral pieces to generate harmonies around the melody you control. The other mouths don't simply repeat your note. They sing supporting parts around it. The CloudFront link used by OpenWeird opens a standalone version of the Adult Swim experience.

Grab the lower lip of the mouth in front and drag it downward. The mouth stretches open and starts singing. The farther you pull, the higher the note, while three other mouths join in with harmonies.

Move the lip to try different notes and hear the harmonies change. The mouths stretch, exposing teeth and tongues as they sing together. Release the lip and the sound settles down. There's no score, levels, or lyrics to follow. You're simply playing an unusually fleshy musical instrument.

Most musical instruments use keys, strings, or buttons. Choir asks you to physically deform a realistic-looking mouth. Pulling a digital lip becomes a way to control pitch, animation, and an entire group of voices.

The strange part is how musical the result can be. The backing mouths harmonize instead of merely copying the lead voice, and changing one note can alter the whole chord. What first looks like a creepy visual joke turns out to be a surprisingly playable little choir.

Choir turns one simple drag gesture into a strange combination of grotesque animation and generative music. It's the kind of browser experiment that's difficult to explain without actually playing it. David Li later explored a related idea with Blob Opera, but Choir remains the much stranger-looking musical toy.