Keep your instruments.
Frog Voice plays MIDI into your Live track. Use your own synths, samplers, or guitar instruments. Genre presets can select named Instrument Rack chains, each with its own effects and sends.
Jam Frog.
Which one are you?
01 / Musicians first
Every musician.
Every next move.
A collaborator that fits into your process, and leaves the choices with you.
Sometimes you want one chord suggestion. Sometimes you want a phrase to answer. Sometimes you want a bandmate to keep playing while you explore. Jam Frog starts with what you play and gives you somewhere to go next.
The genre buttons are starting points. All styles keeps the door open to music beyond those labels: ambient, a hybrid sound, or something you haven't named yet. It follows your chord context; it doesn't need to classify your music into a preset.
Our ambition is to build with every musician in mind. Today's prototype listens to MIDI chords in Ableton Live 12 Suite on macOS. More instruments and more workflows are part of the road ahead.
02 / A conversation in chords
You start.
The frog takes a turn.
Keep composing in Live. Jam Frog listens through MIDI and plays on its own instrument track, in time with your session.
YOUR PHRASE 4 BARS
Cmaj7Am7Fmaj7G7
THREE NEXT MOVES FROG SUGGESTS
Am7Fmaj7Dm7
FamiliarAdventurous
Illustrative chord choices. Live MIDI runs in the desktop app.
01
A little nudge forward.
Get three possible next chords based on your playing, key, genre, and weirdness setting. Choose the one that sounds like you.
- Answer
- Choose 2, 4, or 8 bars. The response lands on the next downbeat, near your played register.
- Jam
- The frog keeps playing, previews the next phrase, and follows changes in your key.
- Your rhythm
- Optionally copy your strike timing, held lengths, re-strikes, and dynamics.
- Your perspective
- Show chord names or Roman numerals. Review musical moments after the jam.
03 / Your session, your sound
A bandmate in
your own workflow.
We chose Ableton integration so the musical conversation can happen alongside your instruments, effects, and recording setup.
Keep your decisions.
Ask for suggestions, take turns, or let the frog accompany you. You decide what to play and keep. The interaction starts with your musical input instead of requiring a whole-song generation prompt.
Keep your session.
Live supplies the tempo and bar clock. Record the frog's MIDI in Live, edit it, arrange it, and keep working in the same set. Your ideas stay part of the session you're already building.
Your MIDI track→Frog Ear→Local chord model→Frog Voice→Your Live instrument
04 / Beyond the labels
Make the frog
sound like you.
An ambient rack of your own.
All styles can work with ambient chord progressions even though Ambient isn't a preset. Build the texture in Live; let Jam Frog offer harmonic starting points.
An example custom preset recipe, not a bundled rack or an ambient-specific model.
USER / AMBIENT SPACEINSTRUMENT RACK
01 / INSTRUMENT
Soft synth pad
A slow attack and gentle filter on your favorite Live instrument.
02 / EFFECT
Long reverb
A spacious tail to connect chords into a continuous texture.
03 / SENDS
Delay + space
Add movement and depth with your existing return tracks.
- Rack chain name
user- Genre
- All styles
- Phrase length
- 8 bars
- Copy my rhythm
- Off for even chord changes
- Ample Guitar strum
- Off for this pad chain
05 / Where Ableton could take it next
More room
to make it yours.
Ideas for future integration. These are possibilities we're exploring, rather than features in the current prototype.
Answers as editable MIDI clips
Drop a frog phrase straight into Session or Arrangement View, then change every note.
Rack macros and automation
Map weirdness and musical controls to rack macros. Automate a shift from familiar to adventurous across a song.
Push and MIDI controller access
Start a response, change the phrase length, or select a suggestion without reaching for the mouse.
A frog that follows your scenes
Connect musical context to scene changes, so a verse and chorus can have different accompaniment settings.
Personal presets, saved with your set
Recall a favorite combination of model settings, instruments, effects, and sends whenever you reopen a project.
More ways to play into the conversation
Explore audio-to-MIDI input for guitar and voice, so more musicians can join without a MIDI keyboard.
06 / The path we took
From a next chord
to a little bandmate.
Built at Hacklanta 2026 by Alex, Katie, and Kevin, with AI coding assistants. The app, models, and artwork grew together.
- 01
Prove the conversation could happen.
We started with MIDI input, chord recognition, and a simple answer back into Live. Frog Ear and Frog Voice became the Max for Live bridge for notes, tempo, and bar timing.
- 02
Give the frog a musical memory.
We prepared Chordonomicon progressions using relative-root tokens, built an n-gram baseline, then trained a genre-conditioned GRU. Exported weights run locally through TypeScript.
- 03
Make the answer playable.
Call and response grew into continuous jams, key-aware choices, voice leading, rhythm copying, genre rack selection, and guitar strums. The weirdness knob can re-plan the next jam block.
- 04
Give the bandmate a face.
A pixel-art frog became individually animated genre performers. We added genre-inspired amps, tempo-aware playing, quieter idle gestures, a shared sprite library, and a still landing-page selector with a gentle hover emphasis.
- 05
Listen, explain, and keep learning.
We built a blind model comparison, local musical analysis, optional Gemini reports, and this showcase. Shared contracts and browser demos let us build in parallel while Alex handled Live integration.
Prediction is one part of musical quality.
Same 20,000-section test sample, seed 0. Accuracy measures recorded next-chord prediction. Our blind A/B tool lets listeners compare the continuations separately.
| Model | Top-1 | Top-3 |
|---|---|---|
| N-gram | 56.2% | 79.6% |
| GRU | 61.5% | 83.3% |
Model results ↗Built together by Alex, Katie, and Kevin
07 / What was hard
Making it feel
like a musician.
We learned that a useful musical assistant needs timing, voicing, and responsive controls as much as a good prediction model.
Notes arrive together. Almost.
Real players don't strike every note at the same instant. We grouped nearby MIDI onsets, recognized inversions and power chords, and ignored note collections that weren't usable chords.
The right chord still needs the right moment.
Answers had to land on Live's bar clock, handle transport changes and interruptions, and release held notes when switching instruments. A BPM clock provides a fallback when Live isn't running.
Surprise needs a musical center.
We balanced model likelihood with key, cadences, voice leading, and repetition penalties. Weirdness opens up borrowed chords and secondary dominants while retaining a connection to the player's key.
One Ableton setup. Three people building.
Only Alex had Live available. Katie and Kevin worked against shared interfaces, mock states, and tests while Alex integrated the pieces. Parallel work also meant resolving overlapping changes to sprites, playback, and UI.
08 / A clear line around your data
The music is local.
Gemini is optional.
The chord models run on your Mac. Gemini can write a post-jam explanation when you add an API key and choose that report mode.
Shock Tracker: Zero Data Challenge. Our local desktop workflow needs no account, tracking, profile, or saved personal information. Choose On this Mac only for a fully local report. The optional Gemini report sends musical facts to Google and is outside that local-only workflow.
During the jam
Your notes, chord recognition, predictions, and MIDI playback stay between the app and Live on localhost. No cloud model is needed to play.
The app has no login, analytics, cookies, or persistent session storage. Record in Live to keep a jam.
With a Gemini report
Once you stop a jam, the app sends Google a symbolic summary: chord names, Roman numerals, bar numbers, key changes, tempo, musical events, and session statistics.
No audio recordings or raw MIDI notes are sent. The API key stays in the desktop app's main process. The facts guide Gemini's written summary and related music trivia.
Your choice
Select On this Mac only to keep the report local, or run without an API key. Local musical analysis is available, and the app falls back to a local report if Gemini is unavailable.
This website doesn't connect to Live or call Gemini. There is no microphone access or third-party video embed.
09 / Make room in your set
Bring the frog
to your next session.
Hackathon prototype for macOS, Ableton Live 12 Suite, and Max for Live. A MIDI instrument track is the current input. You'll need Node.js 20+ to run from source.
- 01
Run the desktop app
Install the app dependencies and launch Jam Frog from the repository.
- 02
Add Frog Ear and Frog Voice
Route your input track to the listener and put the voice on the frog's instrument track.
- 03
Choose your sound. Play a phrase.
Use a genre chain or your own
userrack. Start with suggestions, then try Answer or Jam.