Create Digital Music » Interview: Smule’s Ge Wang on iPhone Apps, Ocarinas, and Democratizing Music Tech

Jul 22 2009

Interview: Smule’s Ge Wang on iPhone Apps, Ocarinas, and Democratizing Music Tech

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

Play this track:

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

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9 Comments

Create Digital Music » Millioniser 2000: 80s-tastic MIDI Harmonica Whose Time Has Come?

[...] Oh yeah – and this all looks strikingly similar to the (less sophisticated) iPhone apps from Smule, featured in today’s interview. [...]

July 22, 2009 @ 7:08 am

spinner

It’s so easy to see these applications as mere toys, and of course to a large extent they are. However they can also be seen as one of many small steps to make music technology much more accessible to people. With this comes the need for a more direct and less convoluted language.

July 22, 2009 @ 10:47 am

crashroots — Blog — Interview: Smule’s Ge Wang on iPhone Apps, Ocarinas, and Democratizing Music Tech

[...] createdigitalmusic [...]

July 23, 2009 @ 6:43 am

m

Unfortunately, ChucK isn’t really efficient at all, it’s actually quite sluggish compared to platforms like Supercollider, or even the venerable CSound. When I downloaded and tested ChucK recently, I was surprised at how much CPU it took just to do some basic synthesis. People have been using realtime synthesis languages for some time now, and my impression is that the only reason using ChucK for live performance is even an option is that computers have gotten powerful enough for it to be usable in modest scenarios. i have great respect for Ge Wang and the work that they put into this project, but beyond the reinventing the wheel factor, I don’t think it lives up to the hype.

Synthesis within ChucK takes place in the same thread of execution as the language, which can lead to dropouts and other unsavory phenomena when the non audio-related computation gets too complicated. On top of this, because everything runs inside ChucK’s virtual machine (as far as I can tell), it simply can’t keep up with more heavily optimized synthesis frameworks where Unit Generators are tightly wound C modules and (in the case of Supercollider) the language and synthesis engine are effectively decoupled.

my 2 cents.

July 24, 2009 @ 8:40 am

Peter Kirn

@m: Heh, well, I meant efficient from an expression standpoint. I don’t mean to hype ChucK. Every project has its shortcomings, and I think the ChucK developers are aware of some of the work they need to do. (well, to the extent these things have ‘hype’ at all!)

I’m personally a big fan of SuperCollider; it’s really my hands-down favorite in terms of design and architecture. So you’re preaching to the converted. But I do have a lot of respect, as well, for what ChucK does and will certainly stay tuned to see if they can make more progress on the performance front.

July 24, 2009 @ 8:50 am

Soma

Yo Ge what up?!

This is Matt Jackson your college dorm mate. Glad to see you doing such cool stuff! :)

Matt

August 1, 2009 @ 10:31 am

Create Digital Music » iPhone Gets New Groove Boxes: Is it Live Synthesis, or is it Canned?

[...] for instance, Smule. As founder Ge Wang discussed with CDM, their Ocarina and Leaf Trombone app are aimed really at non-musicians. But because these instruments use synthesized sound, people are [...]

August 17, 2009 @ 12:57 pm

Create Digital Music » “I Am T-Pain” Brings Auto-Tune to iPhone, “I’m on a Boat” To You

[...] with T-Pain and Auto-Tune to bring a T-Pain-branded app to the mobile platform. I interviewed Ge Wang earlier; he gets exceptional music geek cred for the creation of the real-time synthesis language [...]

September 4, 2009 @ 12:47 pm

Create Digital Music » iPhone Day: LaDiDa’s Reverse Karaoke Composes Accompaniment to Singing

[...] The app’s creator Khush follows in the footsteps of Smule in that it takes hard-core academic music research and uses mobile devices as a vessel for getting that tech in the hands (literally) of the general public. (See my interview with Smule founder and ChucK originator Dr. Ge Wang.) [...]