Ge Wang You don't use computers to make music the same way most people use computers to make music. Use computers to make…computer music. Wang works at Stanford, as an associate professor in the Center for Computing Research in Music and Acoustics. He also runs the school famous portable orchestraHe co-founded music app maker Smule and created a programming language called Chuck that converts code into sound. He understands how computers, music, and humans interact more deeply than most. He also has some ideas about where everything is headed.
In this episode of Las VergecastThe third and final in our miniseries on the future of music, we chat with Wang about the future of computer music. He tells us how to teach his students to play with technology rather than trying to master it, and how tool makers should approach their work in an age of ai.
This conversation goes to unexpected and deep places, as many conversations about ai tend to do. We talk a lot about what it means to be creative, and even human, in a world full of technology intended to make everything more efficient, less complicated, and more homogeneous.
Whether you're writing an email or a symphony, there's a tool designed to make it easier. But is the goal easier? And if not, how do we preserve all the things that make hard work worth it? What are we humans here for? Like I said, it got deep. But we enjoyed it and we think you will too.
If you'd like to learn more about Ge and his work, here are some links to get you started:
