The Machine That Makes You Musical
By ROB WALKER November 23, 2011
In a dimly lighted conference room in the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of Smule, a maker of music apps, Ge Wang was sitting in a meeting with his colleagues, humming, singing and making odd whooshing noises into the microphone of an iPad, checking the screen, and then pounding fugues of code into an attached laptop. Poking at his devices, he reminded me of a child obliviously amusing himself while the grown-ups natter on around him. Nobody else in the meeting seemed to notice Wang's behavior as they listened to a debriefing about recent updates to Smule's Mini Magic Piano app.
When the guy at the head of the table mentioned that the graphics on the welcome page now subtly pulse, Wang looked up. "Yeahhhh," he said. "Classic Smule," he added in a mutter to nobody in particular. "Everything needs to pulse." Then he blew into his iPad mic and banged some more code.
Wang, who is 34 and a founder of the company, often leaves an impression of childlike distractedness. But in fact he's distressingly productive. He was coding in someone else's meeting in July because he had just two hours to prepare for a presentation on a new Smule product, code-named "Project Oke." His company has been remarkably successful, but the app-o-sphere is more competitive than it used to be, and there was a lot riding on his coming up with another hit - ideally by year's end.
Wang likes to say that he has two full-time jobs, and they seem wholly distinct. At Stanford University, where he is an assistant professor, he teaches a full course load through the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (usually referred to as CCRMA, pronounced "karma"), presiding over a highly experimental "orchestra" that performs with cleverly customized laptops, cellphones and other electronics. It's very cutting edge and, in terms of audience, very rarefied. At Smule, a profit-driven, private company that recently raised its second round of venture-capital financing, he devises applications bought by millions.
Founded in 2008, Smule released several apps in rapid succession, but its breakthrough was the Ocarina. Exploiting the iPhone's microphone as well as its touch-screen interface, Wang converted the device into an easy-to-play flute-like instrument. In what has become a Smule signature, the app also included a representation of the globe, with little dots that light up to show where in the world someone is playing the app at that moment. With a tap, you can listen. It's also possible to arrange a duet with an Ocarina user thousands of miles of way, whom you've never met. The Ocarina was downloaded half a million times, at 99 cents a pop, in its first couple of months, making it the top-selling app for three straight weeks; a new artist selling that many downloads of a single today would probably end up on the cover of Rolling Stone.
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