Ge Wang GS ’08: Making music through iPhone apps

Ge Wang GS ’08 has turned out some pretty quirky iPhone apps. Ocarina is a touchscreen flute that you play by blowing into an iPhone’s microphone. Magic Piano allows you to play duets with a complete stranger. There’s even I Am T-Pain, an app that autotunes your voice to mimic that of Mr. Pain himself.

And Wang has several more tricks up his sleeve. As co-founder and chief creative officer of Smule, a music app developer based in Palo Alto, Calif., he is constantly tinkering with new ideas for apps. At the end of this year, Smule hopes to roll out a new app, currently named Sing, Robot, Sing!, which features a singing and dancing robot.

“We’re charging ahead,” Wang said.

Smule’s apps enable iPhone users who might not see themselves as musicians to create music, Wang said. They also encourage “new types of social interactions,” he said, because their availability on the iPhone means they can connect millions of people with the touch of a screen.

Indeed, Wang noted that the Glee Karaoke app, which enables users to collaborate on songs with others, gained popularity following the Japan earthquake when a woman recorded a version of “Lean on Me” using it. Soon afterward, 5,000 individuals added their own voices to her rendition.

“It was like this anonymous world choir,” Wang said.

Similarly, Ocarina — Smule’s most successful app at six million downloads — allows users to listen in on other people currently using their Ocarina around the world using a globe touchscreen.

Besides his full-time work at Smule, Wang is also an associate professor at Stanford University where he teaches a full course load in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). And, though teaching courses might seem miles away from the apps that Wang develops through Smule, he noted that the “dual-pronged approach” has its benefits.

“It’s actually been quite nice, and there’s a lot of intersection with the work I do in Smule,” Wang said. “It hasn’t killed me yet.”

Wang said he discovered his interest in using computers to make music during his undergraduate years at Duke University, where he majored in computer science. Though he had always loved both computers and music, he cited a class on electronic music — the only one of its kind at Duke — as the moment when he first “realized that you can combine the two.”

At Princeton, Wang’s involvement with computer music continued to blossom. As a graduate student, he worked closely with computer music pioneer and Smule consultant Perry Cook as well as music composition professor Paul Lansky. He soon developed an open-source computer language called Chuck, which he now uses to create most of Smule’s apps. He was also involved in a laptop “orchestra,” started in 2005 by Cook, that aimed to recreate the intimate sound of normal instruments using multiple laptops and orb-shaped speakers.

Wang called his experience at the University “transformative,” noting that it helped him “figure out how to be a researcher.” But he also reminisced about the lighter moments of his time as a graduate student.

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“I actually miss Hoagie Haven a lot,” he said. “When you’re working on code really late at night and you need a bacon cheesesteak ... Hoagie Haven definitely helped fuel a lot of my projects.”

Wang cofounded Smule in 2008 after meeting Jeff Smith, a Stanford PhD student who had worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for 20 years.

“Initially, the idea was completely crazy to me,” Wang explained. “I had just started a tenure track position, and to this day I love it. I was also finishing my dissertation at the time, so I was kind of dying.”

But Wang said he was also captivated by the opportunity that Smule presented.

“From a researcher’s point of view, a start-up company would build products that would reach millions of people — the masses,” he explained. “As a researcher, that seemed like an opportunity that I could not afford to pass.”

Building user-friendly and creative apps is certainly a challenge, Wang said. He explained that Smule aims to make the technology behind the apps “as invisible as possible.” There are also the issues of connecting users through cloud computing, managing large databases of information and marketing the apps to customers. For every feature that makes the cut, four or five others have been developed and discarded, he said.

“It all comes back to design, to implementation,” said Wang. “How do we want to engage people?”

At 35 employees, Smule is still a small company, and Wang generally hires individuals whom he or other employees have worked with — though he brings in new talent as well. But the company is continuing to expand and increase publicity.

“There’s a lot of [student] interest in the design in creation, as well as the entrepreneurial aspect,” Wang noted. “They’re interested in every aspect of this; they want the 360-degree view of how things work.”

Though Wang acknowledged the difficulties of projecting where Smule will be in five years, he emphasized the role that technology will play in shaping the creation of music, especially because Smule’s apps allow individuals to listen to other people’s musical creations worldwide.

“We want to start changing the way the people start thinking about music — who makes it, where it’s made,” Wang said.

But his ultimate goal for the company’s apps is to “take people back in time” to an era when everyone, not just a select few, could feel comfortable making music.

“I think it was Picasso who said it: Everyone is born an artist. You can sort of see that in children; they’re unafraid to try new things, and there’s no fear of embarrassment,” Wang said. “At some point, I don’t know what it is, but people start losing that. We want to undo it.”