For her summer internship, Rebecca Fiebrink GS helped design the "I Am T-Pain" app, allowing iPhone users to Auto-Tune their voices and share their performances online. No, the computer science student didn't get to meet T-Pain, but she did design the software to help you become him.
Q
How did you get involved with Smule and the "I Am T-Pain" app?
A
I was a good friend of Ge Wang, a professor at Stanford, while he was a graduate student here. He developed a music programming language, called ChucK, which I work on as part of my research in computer music and digital audio. When he got a job at Stanford, one of his graduate students approached him about starting a company to put ChucK on the iPhone and create mobile music applications to go with it. So that's how Smule got started, and I got into iPhone development through them.
Q
"I Am T-Pain" was the top-selling app on the iTunes store and has been featured on TV and in magazines and shown off by T-Pain himself. Are you surprised at the amount of success that it has received in the less than a month that it has been available?
A
Smule has a really solid team of developers, and the goal all along was to make something that would go to number one and have a really public presence. So I'm not totally surprised. But it's surprising to me that so many people are actually using something I worked on.
Q
Was adapting the Auto-Tune technology from a desktop application to an iPhone application a challenge?
A
It was very interesting. Auto-tune was designed to run on professional recording studio hardware. Your phone has got very little memory, a relatively weak processor and even over 3G, the phone doesn't have a lot of bandwidth for sharing the songs that you've recorded.
Q
With the app, you can record your performance and send it to other people. Moving into the future, aside from Auto-tuning yourself, how do you see the social aspects of these applications becoming more important?
A
I think that, in some sense, it's bringing us back to our past as musical beings. Before the advent of recording, people would make music together. It was done interactively, and it was done by people who weren't professionals. One of the things that really excites me about the work that Smule is doing, and one way that I see things going with mobile technology, is enabling people to do that again, with new types of music, to create music even though you're not a professional and haven't been trained as a singer or an ocarina player. You can still make something that's musical and fun, and you can share that with people and bring that into your social life.
Q
Which song is your favorite to Auto-tune yourself?
A
I really like "Buy U A Drank." I had to do all this audio work this summer, debugging the app, so you actually have to use it and make some noise. I spent two months singing "Buy U A Drank" out of tune and really badly. And so did a lot of other people in the office.
- Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Guy Wood.
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