Music and computer science expert - Ge Wang

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Ge Wang
Assistant Professor in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and, by courtesy, of Computer Science

Biography

Professor Ge Wang’s mission is to deeply explore new ways with which people work, play, think, and interact through sound, technology, and music. As an assistant professor in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Wang explores methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music.

As a Ph.D. student at Princeton, Wang composed his own music-manipulating computer language. Looking to focus on the intersection of music and computer science, he along with his advisor Perry Cook, and other Princeton researchers authored a programming language completely tailored for sound. Naming it ChucK, the language allowed them to alter sound for performance motives through its ability to quickly synthesize sound. Wang composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and computer-mediated with the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO), two groups that he founded and now directs.

Wang research includes mobile music and music information retrieval. Wang is the Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule. Also known as SonicMule, Inc., Smule is a startup company exploring interactive sonic media, with mobile devices. 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. Ge is the designer of Ocarina, an expressive wind instrument for the iPhone. The program enables users to not only expressively play music, but listen to one anothers around the world. 
Professor Wang is also interested in visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, and interactive audio over networks. He is the co-creator of the TAPESTREA sound design environment, and a lead developer of audio visualizations.  His article "TAPESTREA: Re-composing Natural Sounds," co-written with Ananya Misra and Perry Cook, won the : 2006 ICMA/Swets & Zeitlinger Distinguished Paper Award. 

He has also won the 2004 ICMA Best Presentation Award for his paper "The Audicle: A Context-sensitive, On-the-fly Audio Programming
Environ/mentality," and The 2009 Creativity 50 Award from Creativity Magazine, awarded annually to 50 individuals worldwide for creative thinking and doing in media, technology, and culture.

 

Key Works

  • “The Mobile Phone Orchestra” with H. Pentinnen. In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music. Eds. S. Gopinath and J. Stanyek. Oxford University Press, 2009.  (forthcoming)
  • “Sonic Media: Creating Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music. Eds. S. Gopinath and J. Stanyek. Oxford University Press, 2009.  (forthcoming)
  • The ChucK Audio Programming Language: A Strongly-timed and On-the-fly Environ/mentality. PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2008.
  • “Musical Tapestry: Re-composing Natural Sounds.” With D. Trueman, S. Smallwood, and P. R. Cook. Journal of New Music Research. 36(4):241-250. (Winner: 2006 ICMA Swets & Zietlinger Distinguished Paper Award)
  • “Non-Specifc Gamelan Taiko Fusion” for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), with Perry Cook. Princeton University, January and April 2006.
  • "Gigapop Ritual." Montreal/Princeton Internet2/CA2Net concert, International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Montreal. May 2003.
  • "On-the-fly Counterpoint” (live coding for laptops and projectors, with Perry Cook). 2003 Listening in the Sound Kitchen Festival, Princeton, NJ.

 

Prof. Wang in the News

 

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