Dec 5, 2009

Social Music On-the-Go - Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra; Ge Wang's SMULE apps for the iPhone

In the Charlotte Observer today, I came across an article about the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra- via the New York Times:

Musicians push edge of computer music with iPhone
Stanford orchestra turns popular songs into elaborate electronic renditions
I remembered that I'd posted about this previously nearly a year ago:  Play a flute by blowing on your iPhone!  In that post, I discussed an iPhone app by Smule called "Ocarina".  (If you follow the link to the post, you can view a video of some folks playing a version of Stairway to Heaven on their iPhones.)

Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO)
Stanford MoPhO
A bit of background information:
Smule is company started by Ge Wang, an assistant professor of music at Stanford who is the director of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra.  He also directs the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk), and previously was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, known as PLOrk.  (Perry Cook, the author of Real Sound Synthesis for Interactive Applications, is one of the directors of PLOrk.)

Ge Wang's Ph.D. work was on ChucK, an audio programming language for "real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and analysis, supported on Mac0S X, Windows, and Linux.  To celebrate Ge Wang's thesis, Perry Cook wrote Everybody Hack ChucK Tonight (.mp3), to the tune of "Everybody Wang Chung Tonight".  The lyrics explain what the ChucK program is all about.

Ge Wang is teaching Mobile Music (Music, Computing, and Design II) at Stanford during the Spring 2010 semester. His department is affiliated with CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. (CCRMA offers non-credit week-long workshops each summer, open to the public. Maybe there will be a workshop on mobile music next summer!)

Enjoy the videos below:





Stanford Report, March 2009




Someone posted this on YouTube for the holidays last December:

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