Ge Wang: The DIY orchestra of the future

103,642 views ・ 2014-06-26

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
I want to talk to you about one thing
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and just one thing only,
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and this has to do with when people ask me,
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what do you do?
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To which I usually respond,
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I do computer music.
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Now, a number of people
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just stop talking to me right then and there,
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and the rest who are left usually have
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this blank look in their eye,
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as if to say, what does that mean?
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And I feel like I'm actually depriving them
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of information by telling them this,
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at which point I usually panic
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and spit out the first thing that comes to my mind,
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which is, I have no idea what I'm doing.
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Which is true.
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That's usually followed by a second thought,
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which is, whatever it is that I'm doing,
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I love it.
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And today, I want to, well,
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share with you something I love,
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and also why.
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And I think we'll begin with just this question:
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What is computer music?
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And I'm going to try to do my best to provide a definition,
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maybe by telling you a story
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that goes through some of the stuff
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I've been working on.
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And the first thing, I think, in our story
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is going to be something called ChucK.
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Now, ChucK is a programming language for music,
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and it's open-source, it's freely available,
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and I like to think that it crashes equally well
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on all modern operating systems.
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And instead of telling you more about it,
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I'm just going to give you a demo.
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By the way, I'm just going to nerd out
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for just a few minutes here,
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so I would say, don't freak out.
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In fact, I would invite all of you to join me
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in just geeking out.
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If you've never written a line of code before in your life,
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do not worry.
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I'll bet you'll be able to come along on this.
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First thing I'm going to do is to make
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a sine wave oscillator,
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and we're going to called the sine wave generator
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"Ge."
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And then we're going to connect "Ge" to the DAC.
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Now this is kind of the abstraction
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for the sound output on my computer. Okay?
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So I've connected myself into the speaker.
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Next, I'm going to say my frequency
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is 440 hertz,
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and I'm going to let time advance
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by two seconds through this operation.
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All right, so if I were to play this --
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(Tone) —
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you would hear a sine wave at 440 hertz for two seconds.
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Okay, great. Now I'm going to copy and paste this,
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and then just change some of these numbers,
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220.5, 440 I shall leave it as that,
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and .5 and 880.
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By doubling the frequency,
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we're actually going up in successive octaves,
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and then we have this sequence --
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(Tones) — of tones.
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Okay, great, now I can imagine creating
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all kinds of really horrible
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single sine wave pieces of music with this,
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but I'm going to do something that computers are really good at,
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which is repetition.
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I'm going to put this all in a while loop,
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and you actually don't need to indent,
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but this is purely for aesthetic reasons.
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It's good practice.
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And when we do this —
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(Tones) —
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that's going to go on for a while.
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In fact, it's probably not going to stop
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until this computer disintegrates.
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And I can't really empirically prove that to you,
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but I hope you'll believe me when I say that.
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Next, I'm going to replace this 220
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by math.random2f.
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I'm going to generate a random number
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between 30 and 1,000 and send that
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to the frequency of me.
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And I'm going to do this every half a second.
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(Tones)
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Let's do this every 200 milliseconds.
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(Tones)
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One hundred.
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(Tones)
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All right.
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At this point, we've reached something
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that I would like to think of as
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the canonical computer music.
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This is, to me, the sound that mainframes
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are supposed to be making
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when they're thinking really hard.
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It's this sound, it's like,
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the square root of five million.
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So is this computer music?
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Yeah, I guess by definition,
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it's kind of computer music.
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It's probably not the kind of music you would listen to
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cruising down the highway,
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but it's a foundation of computer-generated music,
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and using ChucK,
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we've actually been building instruments
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in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra,
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based right here at Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
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Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops,
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humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays.
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Now the reason we have these
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is so that for the instruments that we create
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out of the laptop, we want the sound to come
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out of somewhere near the instrument
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and the performer,
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kind of much like a traditional, acoustic instrument.
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Like, if I were to play a violin here,
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the sound would naturally not come out of
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the P.A. system, but from the artifact itself.
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So these speakers are meant to emulate that.
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In fact, I'm going to show you
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how we actually built them.
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The first step is to go to IKEA
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and buy a salad bowl.
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This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt.
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That's the actual name,
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and I actually use one of these
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to make salad at home as well, I kid you not.
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And the first step is you turn it upside down,
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and then you drill holes in them,
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six holes per hemi,
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and then make a base plate,
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put car speaker drivers in them
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along with amplifiers in the enclosure,
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and you put that all together and you have
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these hemispherical speaker arrays.
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Add people, add laptops,
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you have a laptop orchestra.
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And what might a laptop orchestra sound like?
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Well, let me give you a demonstration
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of about 200 instruments we've created so far
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for the Laptop Orchestra.
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And what I'm going to do is actually come over to this thing.
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This thing I have in front of me
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actually used to be a commodity gaming controller
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called a Gametrak.
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This thing actually has a glove you can put on your hands.
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It's tethered to the base,
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and this will track the position of your hands
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in real time.
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It was originally designed as a golfing controller
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to detect the motion of your swing.
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That turned out to be a rather large
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commercial non-success,
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at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars,
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at which point computer music researchers
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said, "This is awesome!
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We can prototype instruments out of this."
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So let me show you one instrument we've created,
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one of many, and this instrument
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is called "Twilight,"
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and it's meant to go with this metaphor
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of pulling a sound out of the ground.
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So let me see if this will work.
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(Music)
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And put it back.
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And then if you go to the left,
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right,
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it sounds like an elephant in pain.
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This is a slightly metallic sound.
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Turn it just a bit.
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(Music)
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It's like a hovering car.
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Okay.
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This third one is a ratchet-like interaction, so
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let me turn it up.
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(Music)
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So it's a slightly different interaction.
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The fourth one is a drone.
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(Music)
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And finally, let's see,
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this is a totally different interaction,
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and I think you have to imagine that there's
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this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage,
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and I'm going to bang it.
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(Drum)
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(Laughter)
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So there we go, so that's one of many instruments
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in the Laptop Orchestra.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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And when you put that together,
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you get something that sounds like this.
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(Music)
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Okay, and so, I think from the experience
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of building a lot of instruments for the Laptop Orchestra,
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and I think from the curiosity of wondering,
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what if we took these
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hopefully expressive instruments
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and we brought it to a lot of people,
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plus then a healthy bout of insanity —
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put those three things together —
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led to me actually co-founding a startup company
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in 2008 called Smule.
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Now Smule's mission is to create
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expressive, mobile music things,
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and one of the first musical instruments
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we created is called Ocarina.
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And I'm going to just demo this for you real quick.
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So Ocarina —
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(Music) —
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is based on this ancient flute-like instrument
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called the ocarina,
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and this one is the four-hole English pendant configuration,
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and you're literally blowing into the microphone
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to make the sound.
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And there's actually a little ChucK script
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running in here that's detecting
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the strength of your blowing
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and also synthesizing the sound.
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(Music)
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And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer,
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so you can get —
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(Music)
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All right. So let me play a little ditty for you,
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a little Bach.
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And here, you'll hear a little accompaniment with the melody.
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The accompaniment actually follows the melody,
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not the other way around.
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(Music)
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And this was designed
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to let you take your time
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and figure out where your expressive space is,
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and you can just hang out here
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for a while, for a really dramatic effect, if you want,
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and whenever you're ready —
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(Music)
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And on these longer notes,
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I'm going to use more vibrato
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towards the end of the notes
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to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality.
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(Music)
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Huh, that's a nice chord to end this excerpt on.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is,
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is this a toy or it an instrument? Maybe it's both,
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but for me, I think the more important question is,
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is it expressive?
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And at the same time, I think
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creating these types of instruments
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asks a question about the role of technology,
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and its place for how we make music.
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Apparently, for example,
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not that long ago, like only a hundred years ago —
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that's not that long in the course of human history —
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families back then
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used to make music together
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as a common form of entertainment.
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I don't think that's really happening
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that much anymore.
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You know, this is before radio, before recording.
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In the last hundred years, with all this technology,
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we now have more access to music
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as listeners and consumers,
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but somehow, I think we're making less music
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than ever before.
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I'm not sure why that would be.
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Maybe it's because it's too easy just to hit play.
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And while listening to music is wonderful,
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there's a special joy to making music
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that's all its own.
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And I think that's one part
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of the goal of why I do what I do
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is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit. Right?
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Now, if that's one goal, the other goal
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is to look to the future and think about
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what kind of new musical things can we make
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that we don't perhaps yet have names for
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that's enabled by technology, but ultimately
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might change the way that humans make music.
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And I'll just give you one example here,
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and this is Ocarina's other feature.
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This is a globe,
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and here you're actually listening
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to other users of Ocarina
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blow into their iPhones to play something.
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This is "G.I.R." from Texas,
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"R.I.K." I don't know why it's these three-letter names today, Los Angeles.
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They're all playing pretty,
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somewhat minimal music here.
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(Music)
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And the idea with this is that, well,
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technology should not be foregrounded here,
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and — (Laughter) —
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we've actually opened this up.
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The first thought is that, hey, you know
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there's somebody somewhere out there
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playing some music,
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and this is a small but I think important
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human connection to make
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that perhaps the technology affords.
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As a final example,
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and perhaps my favorite example,
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is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake
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and tsunami disaster in Japan,
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a woman reached out in one of our singing apps
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to try to get people to join in to sing with her
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on a version of "Lean on Me."
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Now, in these apps, there's this thing that allows
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any user to add their voice
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to an existing performance by any other user
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or group of users,
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so in some sense, she's created this kind of
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global ad hoc corral of strangers,
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and within weeks, thousands of people
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joined in on this,
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and you can kind of see people coming from all around the world
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and all these lines converging on the origin
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where the first rendition of the song was sung,
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and that's in Tokyo.
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And this is what it sounds like when there's 1,000 people.
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This is 1,000 voices.
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(Recording) ♪ Sometimes in our lives ♪
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♪ We all have pain, we all have sorrow ♪
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♪ But if we are wise ♪
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♪ We know that there's always tomorrow ♪
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♪ Lean on me ♪
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♪ When you're not strong ♪
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♪ And I'll be your friend ♪
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♪ I'll help you carry on ♪
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♪ For it won't be long ♪
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♪ Till I'm gonna need ♪
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♪ Somebody to lean on ♪
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♪ Just lean on — ♪
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Is this computer music?
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(Applause)
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Was that computer music?
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Yeah, I guess so; it's something that you really
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couldn't have done without computers.
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But at the same time, it's also just human,
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and I think what I've essentially answered so far
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is maybe why I do the stuff that I do,
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and let's just finally return to the first question:
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What is computer music?
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And I think that the catch here is that,
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at least to me, computer music
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isn't really about computers.
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It is about people.
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It's about how we can use technology
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to change the way we think
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and do and make music,
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and maybe even add to how we can
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connect with each other through music.
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And with that, I want to say,
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this is computer music, and thank you for listening.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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