The DIY orchestra of the future

Ge Wang makes computer music, but it isn’t all about coded bleeps and blips. With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, he creates new instruments out of unexpected materials — like an Ikea bowl — that allow musicians to play music that’s both beautiful and expressive.

I want to talk to you about one thing

and just one thing only,

and this has to do with when people ask me,

what do you do?

To which I usually respond,

I do computer music.

Now, a number of people

just stop talking to me right then and there,

and the rest who are left usually have

this blank look in their eye,

as if to say, what does that mean?

And I feel like I'm actually depriving them

of information by telling them this,

at which point I usually panic

and spit out the first thing that comes to my mind,

which is, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Which is true.

That's usually followed by a second thought,

which is, whatever it is that I'm doing,

I love it.

And today, I want to, well,

share with you something I love,

and also why.

And I think we'll begin with just this question:

What is computer music?

And I'm going to try to do my
best to provide a definition,

maybe by telling you a story

that goes through some of the stuff

I've been working on.

And the first thing, I think, in our story

is going to be something called ChucK.

Now, ChucK is a programming language for music,

and it's open-source, it's freely available,

and I like to think that it crashes equally well

on all modern operating systems.

And instead of telling you more about it,

I'm just going to give you a demo.

By the way, I'm just going to nerd out

for just a few minutes here,

so I would say, don't freak out.

In fact, I would invite all of you to join me

in just geeking out.

If you've never written a line
of code before in your life,

do not worry.

I'll bet you'll be able to come along on this.

First thing I'm going to do is to make

a sine wave oscillator,

and we're going to called the sine wave generator

"Ge."

And then we're going to connect "Ge" to the DAC.

Now this is kind of the abstraction

for the sound output on my computer. Okay?

So I've connected myself into the speaker.

Next, I'm going to say my frequency

is 440 hertz,

and I'm going to let time advance

by two seconds through this operation.

All right, so if I were to play this --

(Tone) —

you would hear a sine wave
at 440 hertz for two seconds.

Okay, great. Now I'm going to copy and paste this,

and then just change some of these numbers,

220.5, 440 I shall leave it as that,

and .5 and 880.

By doubling the frequency,

we're actually going up in successive octaves,

and then we have this sequence --

(Tones) — of tones.

Okay, great, now I can imagine creating

all kinds of really horrible

single sine wave pieces of music with this,

but I'm going to do something
that computers are really good at,

which is repetition.

I'm going to put this all in a while loop,

and you actually don't need to indent,

but this is purely for aesthetic reasons.

It's good practice.

And when we do this —

(Tones) —

that's going to go on for a while.

In fact, it's probably not going to stop

until this computer disintegrates.

And I can't really empirically prove that to you,

but I hope you'll believe me when I say that.

Next, I'm going to replace this 220

by math.random2f.

I'm going to generate a random number

between 30 and 1,000 and send that

to the frequency of me.

And I'm going to do this every half a second.

(Tones)

Let's do this every 200 milliseconds.

(Tones)

One hundred.

(Tones)

All right.

At this point, we've reached something

that I would like to think of as

the canonical computer music.

This is, to me, the sound that mainframes

are supposed to be making

when they're thinking really hard.

It's this sound, it's like,

the square root of five million.

So is this computer music?

Yeah, I guess by definition,

it's kind of computer music.

It's probably not the kind of music you would listen to

cruising down the highway,

but it's a foundation of computer-generated music,

and using ChucK,

we've actually been building instruments

in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra,

based right here at Stanford Center for
Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops,

humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays.

Now the reason we have these

is so that for the instruments that we create

out of the laptop, we want the sound to come

out of somewhere near the instrument

and the performer,

kind of much like a traditional, acoustic instrument.

Like, if I were to play a violin here,

the sound would naturally not come out of

the P.A. system, but from the artifact itself.

So these speakers are meant to emulate that.

In fact, I'm going to show you

how we actually built them.

The first step is to go to IKEA

and buy a salad bowl.

This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt.

That's the actual name,

and I actually use one of these

to make salad at home as well, I kid you not.

And the first step is you turn it upside down,

and then you drill holes in them,

six holes per hemi,

and then make a base plate,

put car speaker drivers in them

along with amplifiers in the enclosure,

and you put that all together and you have

these hemispherical speaker arrays.

Add people, add laptops,

you have a laptop orchestra.

And what might a laptop orchestra sound like?

Well, let me give you a demonstration

of about 200 instruments we've created so far

for the Laptop Orchestra.

And what I'm going to do is
actually come over to this thing.

This thing I have in front of me

actually used to be a commodity gaming controller

called a Gametrak.

This thing actually has a glove
you can put on your hands.

It's tethered to the base,

and this will track the position of your hands

in real time.

It was originally designed as a golfing controller

to detect the motion of your swing.

That turned out to be a rather large

commercial non-success,

at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars,

at which point computer music researchers

said, "This is awesome!

We can prototype instruments out of this."

So let me show you one instrument we've created,

one of many, and this instrument

is called "Twilight,"

and it's meant to go with this metaphor

of pulling a sound out of the ground.

So let me see if this will work.

(Music)

And put it back.

And then if you go to the left,

right,

it sounds like an elephant in pain.

This is a slightly metallic sound.

Turn it just a bit.

(Music)

It's like a hovering car.

Okay.

This third one is a ratchet-like interaction, so

let me turn it up.

(Music)

So it's a slightly different interaction.

The fourth one is a drone.

(Music)

And finally, let's see,

this is a totally different interaction,

and I think you have to imagine that there's

this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage,

and I'm going to bang it.

(Drum)

(Laughter)

So there we go, so that's one of many instruments

in the Laptop Orchestra.

(Applause)

Thank you.

And when you put that together,

you get something that sounds like this.

(Music)

Okay, and so, I think from the experience

of building a lot of instruments
for the Laptop Orchestra,

and I think from the curiosity of wondering,

what if we took these

hopefully expressive instruments

and we brought it to a lot of people,

plus then a healthy bout of insanity —

put those three things together —

led to me actually co-founding a startup company

in 2008 called Smule.

Now Smule's mission is to create

expressive, mobile music things,

and one of the first musical instruments

we created is called Ocarina.

And I'm going to just demo this for you real quick.

So Ocarina —

(Music) —

is based on this ancient flute-like instrument

called the ocarina,

and this one is the four-hole
English pendant configuration,

and you're literally blowing into the microphone

to make the sound.

And there's actually a little ChucK script

running in here that's detecting

the strength of your blowing

and also synthesizing the sound.

(Music)

And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer,

so you can get —

(Music)

All right. So let me play a little ditty for you,

a little Bach.

And here, you'll hear a little
accompaniment with the melody.

The accompaniment actually follows the melody,

not the other way around.

(Music)

And this was designed

to let you take your time

and figure out where your expressive space is,

and you can just hang out here

for a while, for a really
dramatic effect, if you want,

and whenever you're ready —

(Music)

And on these longer notes,

I'm going to use more vibrato

towards the end of the notes

to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality.

(Music)

Huh, that's a nice chord to end this excerpt on.

(Applause)

Thank you.

So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is,

is this a toy or it an instrument? Maybe it's both,

but for me, I think the more important question is,

is it expressive?

And at the same time, I think

creating these types of instruments

asks a question about the role of technology,

and its place for how we make music.

Apparently, for example,

not that long ago, like only a hundred years ago —

that's not that long in the course of human history —

families back then

used to make music together

as a common form of entertainment.

I don't think that's really happening

that much anymore.

You know, this is before radio, before recording.

In the last hundred years, with all this technology,

we now have more access to music

as listeners and consumers,

but somehow, I think we're making less music

than ever before.

I'm not sure why that would be.

Maybe it's because it's too easy just to hit play.

And while listening to music is wonderful,

there's a special joy to making music

that's all its own.

And I think that's one part

of the goal of why I do what I do

is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit. Right?

Now, if that's one goal, the other goal

is to look to the future and think about

what kind of new musical things can we make

that we don't perhaps yet have names for

that's enabled by technology, but ultimately

might change the way that humans make music.

And I'll just give you one example here,

and this is Ocarina's other feature.

This is a globe,

and here you're actually listening

to other users of Ocarina

blow into their iPhones to play something.

This is "G.I.R." from Texas,

"R.I.K." I don't know why it's these
three-letter names today, Los Angeles.

They're all playing pretty,

somewhat minimal music here.

(Music)

And the idea with this is that, well,

technology should not be foregrounded here,

and — (Laughter) —

we've actually opened this up.

The first thought is that, hey, you know

there's somebody somewhere out there

playing some music,

and this is a small but I think important

human connection to make

that perhaps the technology affords.

As a final example,

and perhaps my favorite example,

is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake

and tsunami disaster in Japan,

a woman reached out in one of our singing apps

to try to get people to join in to sing with her

on a version of "Lean on Me."

Now, in these apps, there's this thing that allows

any user to add their voice

to an existing performance by any other user

or group of users,

so in some sense, she's created this kind of

global ad hoc corral of strangers,

and within weeks, thousands of people

joined in on this,

and you can kind of see people
coming from all around the world

and all these lines converging on the origin

where the first rendition of the song was sung,

and that's in Tokyo.

And this is what it sounds like
when there's 1,000 people.

This is 1,000 voices.

(Recording) ♪ Sometimes in our lives ♪

♪ We all have pain, we all have sorrow ♪

♪ But if we are wise ♪

♪ We know that there's always tomorrow ♪

♪ Lean on me ♪

♪ When you're not strong ♪

♪ And I'll be your friend ♪

♪ I'll help you carry on ♪

♪ For it won't be long ♪

♪ Till I'm gonna need ♪

♪ Somebody to lean on ♪

♪ Just lean on — ♪

Is this computer music?

(Applause)

Was that computer music?

Yeah, I guess so; it's something that you really

couldn't have done without computers.

But at the same time, it's also just human,

and I think what I've essentially answered so far

is maybe why I do the stuff that I do,

and let's just finally return to the first question:

What is computer music?

And I think that the catch here is that,

at least to me, computer music

isn't really about computers.

It is about people.

It's about how we can use technology

to change the way we think

and do and make music,

and maybe even add to how we can

connect with each other through music.

And with that, I want to say,

this is computer music, and thank you for listening.

(Applause)