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

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

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:18:51 +0000

[...] 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.) [...]

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

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:47:32 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

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

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:57:30 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Soma

Soma — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:31:48 +0000

Yo Ge what up?!

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

Matt

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:50:12 +0000

@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.

By: m

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:40:51 +0000

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.

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

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:43:49 +0000

[...] createdigitalmusic [...]

By: spinner

spinner — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:47:16 +0000

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.

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

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:08:27 +0000

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