Ge Wang, co-founder and CTO of Smule, and an assistant professor at Stanford University, describes his mission to deeply explore new ways for people to think and interact through sound, technology, and music. Wang hopes to help people to overcome their inhibitions and pre-conceptions about making music. Smule is the maker of several popular music applications including the Ocarina for the iPhone and Magic Piano for the iPad.
Bio:
Ge Wang received his B.S. in Computer Science in 2000 from Duke University, PhD in Computer Science (advisor Perry Cook) in 2008 from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
His research interests include interactive software systems (of all sizes) for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestra and mobile phone orchestra) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), mobile music, music information retrieval, visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. He is the chief architect and co-creator of the ChucK audio programming language, and the Audicle environment.
He was a founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), the founder and director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), and of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). He was also a co-creator of the TAPESTREA sound design environment, and a lead developer of audio visualizations such as sndpeek.
Additionally, he is the Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule (a.k.a. SonicMule, Inc.), a startup company exploring interactive sonic media, with mobile devices such as the iPhone. Smule serves as a unique platform for research and development combining the state-of-the-art in computer music research with the potential to bring its visions to a wide population. He is the designer of Ocarina, an expressive wind instrument for the iPhone, currently enabling hundreds of thousands of users to not only expressively play music, but listen to one anothers around the world.