Google has endeavored to improve the value proposition of Pixels with regular "feature drops" over the past few years. These are usually new features built into the OS update, but the June 2022 drop included a new app exclusively for Pixels in the Play Store. It's called Pocket Operator by the well-known music design firm, teenage engineering, and it leverages the power of TensorFlow to make music. It's fun, and a little bit silly, but most importantly, you don't have to know a thing about music to have a good time.

A steep learning curve

Pocket Operator is the latest in a series of apps and features that use machine learning on your phone to do things that would have been difficult or impossible in the past. Here, the AI magic takes video and extracts distinct sounds, which you can then use to create soundscapes. You're limited to a few seconds of video for each "track," of which you have four in each project. These sounds don't have to be particularly musical—with a few beats, effects, and some repetition, the results are surprisingly melodic. I mostly used the clack of mechanical keyboards and some video game sound effects to play around with the app.

The gist is that you have four video tracks, from which you can build a pattern of 16 beats. You can layer the tracks, apply effects, and modify many other aspects of the sound. As you change the sound effects, the app inserts frames from the video to make a quick-cut clip to go with the music.

When you start using Pocket Operator, it offers to run you through a quick tutorial, and you should accept the offer. Many of the app's buttons are unlabeled, and while that's not great for usability, it does give Pocket Operator a fun, esoteric vibe. The first few times you tinker with the app, you will be the embodiment of the chemistry dog meme. The tutorial almost seems to intentionally leave some parts of the UI unexplained so you can discover them. I'm not musically inclined, so I'm still not entirely sure what all these buttons and icons do, but I enjoy trying to find out.

For example, I probably messed around with the app for a good 45 minutes before I realized I could swipe on the top half of the mixer (where the video is) to access even more functions like beats per minute, key, and several other features I still don't understand. But that seems to be okay in this case.

But still fun

You can see my masterpiece above. It consists of several tracks of me aggressively tapping buttons on my various mechanical keyboards (switches include Clickiez, Box Pinks, Holy Pandas, Zealio V2, and TTC Matrix) along with some sound effects from an X-Men arcade game in my office. I know the sounds profile of these keyboard switches pretty well, and some of them have more than one distinct sound. Nine times out of ten, Pocket Operator was able to correctly group the entire press together, making them more useful for mixing. That impressed me.

Again, I don't know anything about music production or theory, but I think the final product is kind of fun, and it was fun to create. Even if you just randomly tap and slide controls, you tend to end up with something that sounds almost intentional.

I don't think you could argue that Pocket Operator is more important than the typical Feature Drop addition, but it's the kind of thing I hope we see more of. It's entertaining, demonstrates the power of on-device machine learning, and it could have meme potential. Smartphones could definitely stand to be more enchanting these days, as the flat glass slab form factor has become so mature and, dare I say, boring.

Google used to have a lot more fun with Android, but now it's trying to be so professional. Apple, which used to rely on buttoned-down WWDC keynotes that poked and prodded Android for missing one metric or another, just made a bunch of silly CGI animations for WWDC—Craig Federighi actually descended into what I can only describe as a futuristic iOS bunker to demo the new version. Meanwhile, Google doesn't even give Android dessert names anymore. And the Android statues? In storage for refurbishment someplace. So please, Google. Let's have more fun like Pocket Operator.