The Machine That Makes You Musical
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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.