26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2018

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emotionally or aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function come together in things is what we call "Design." Today's guest, Ge Wang, is a computer scientist and electronic musician with a new book called Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. It's incredibly creative in both substance and style, featuring a unique photo-comic layout and many thoughtful ideas about the nature of design, both practical and idealistic. Ge Wang received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University, and is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He is the author of the ChucK programming language for musical applications, and co-founder of the mobile-app developer Smule. He has given a well-known TED talk where he demonstrates Ocarina, an app for turning an iPhone into a wind instrument. Stanford Web page Artful Design home page (and Amazon page) TED talk on the DIY Orchestra of the Future Stanford Laptop Orchestra Smule Wikipedia page Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.1	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:05.1	And as I've said before, one of the major motivations for me personally in doing a podcast
0:09.2	project is to be able to explore things other than what I do for a living, mostly physics,
0:14.1	a little bit of philosophy.
0:15.2	So the podcast lets me talk to other scientists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists.
0:21.4	And it also lets me go beyond science.
0:23.0	We've talked to poker players and movie directors and musicians and so forth.
0:26.5	So today's podcast is definitely one of those examples of going well beyond my comfort
0:31.9	zone.
0:32.9	Go Wang, today's guest is actually a computer scientist, officially, a computer programmer
0:39.2	at Stanford University.
0:41.1	And that's my comfort zone, okay.
0:43.3	But his specialty is computer programming of music.
0:47.3	So he builds instruments that make computers into musical instruments.
0:52.4	He puts on performances with laptop orchestras, things like that.
0:57.0	Go Wang has a famous TED talk where he demonstrates an iPhone Acarina.
1:03.0	You can actually, if you have an iPhone, go to the app store, download an app called Acarina,
1:07.8	which will turn your iPhone into a musical instrument.
1:10.2	You don't need any extra hardware.
1:11.5	You blow into the microphone and make beautiful music.
1:14.0	We'll actually have a demonstration on the podcast today.
	...

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