It's super cool, super smart, super fresh, but still sounds like those synthesizer in 90's. I was really expecting something new when I opened the link...
Seems more like a hipster-ish take on making music. "I only make music on instruments that I can build myself."
There are also any number of ways to make cool new sounds, even using old tech. (My current favourite is Aparillo by SugarBytes, which uses FM but sounds absolutely amazing.)
This Google project seems to be a technology demonstrator made by people who seem curiously unaware of the domain they're trying to work in.
There is a lot of competition in this space and this project is doing nothing remotely new, including the ML element.
All of which might be forgivable if the sound was unbelievably awesome... but it isn't.
Seriously though, this announcement from Google does reek of "invented in ignorance"-style NIH'erism .. but then again, it may be an effective marketing ploy, given that there are so, so many kids getting into synthesisers, who don't have a foggy clue what decades of technology has produced, in terms of the state of the art.
Its a common thing in synthesisers though - someone comes up with some 'amazing new technique nobody has ever thought of before', and ends up .. producing sounds just like the 303's and DX's before them ..
I wish people would stop using this tired and bland description of people's motives to enjoy fresh, new, creative and diy. It seems pretty intellectually shallow to me.
So does spending a crazy amount of time and tech to implement something that could be done in other existing synthesizers with a fraction of the time/effort, just so that you can say "I made this with ML."
Spoiler alert, it's the buzz around ML.
The device is a nice toy, but even they say it's unpredictable. Usually you need about 4 samples per octave and 4 samples for different velocities (note loudness) for professional use. Would NSynth generate all those samples in uniform way so they can work together as a single instrument?