Google's AI jams, and now a live chord readout lets them play along
Google released Magenta for live music generation. One weekend night with Claude added a spectrograph with key and chord analysis to its Collider app, so they can grab a guitar and join in.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user epiccoleman· Oct 15, 2026
Result Also built Tuber, a video summary tool
“It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Opened Google’s open-source Magenta live music project with Claude and, after a few passes and some annoying toolchain issues, added a spectrograph that analyses key and chords to the “Collider” app, giving a live readout of what the band is playing. They also built Tuber, a command-line wrapper around yt-dlp that can send subtitles through Claude for a summary.
How it went
It worked: they can pick up a guitar and join the jam with the chords on screen. It’s the kind of thing that once would have taken too much effort to be worthwhile, done in one fun weekend night.
Try it yourself with Claude
Here's an open-source music app: [repo]. Add a panel that listens to its audio output and shows, live, the current key and chord being played, with a simple spectrogram. Get the build working first and tell me about any toolchain problems, then add the feature in small steps I can test as we go.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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