Google lets you remix hot tracks in VR with its new music toy

Song Exploder, one of the coolest podcasts ever created, invites artists to dissect their popular tracks to show listeners how they came together, one instrument at a time. It’s now teamed up with Google to create Inside Music, an app that lets you hear and remix these songs as you see fit – in VR.

Phoenix, Perfume Genius, Natalia Lafourcade, Ibeyi, Alarm Will Sound and Clipping have their tracks on there now, so you can move around a spacey 3D environment in your browser or in VR (the easiest option is to just grab a Cardboard and load up the site on your phone) to turn individual layers of music on and off as the song plays.

Thanks to the magic of spatial audio, you’ll be able to feel the sound change as you move towards and away from instruments around the virtual space.

Turning off the strings and wind instruments in Roadrunner performed by Alarm Will Sound gives you an idea of just how detailed composer John Adams’ pieces can get; if you enjoy listening to isolated vocal tracks like I do, you should try switching off everything by Thomas Mars’ voice on French rockers Phoenix’s Ti Amo.

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It’s a fun little toy to while away a couple of hours with; if you’re keen on building an Inside Music experience for your own tracks, you can fiddle with the code in this GitHub repository and build a custom app.