I want to tell you a story about music, computer science, and design.
This is where I work.
Now, I don't just mean Stanford,
I work underneath those chimneys way in the back, behind MemChu.
>> [LAUGH] >> That's the Nor and that is
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, CCRMA, CCRMA.
And that's me in my office.
I've been here for about 12 years, and, well, what is it that I do?
I build things, I make things, I design.
I design programming languages, software, tools, musical instruments, toys, games,
and social experiments on the surface of music and music making.
And I do this by writing a lot of code, I love writing code.
Code is my craft, I consider it my art and it's really my tool.
And one of my ongoing research project is a programming language called Chuck
which can be used to synthesize sound but also to generate music.
As Dan mentioned, I direct the Stanford Laptop Orchestra or
also Mobile Phone Orchestra.
We are MoPhO, Mobile Phone Orchestra.
>> [LAUGH] >> I also work on
music making on mobile devices.
As well as more recently virtual reality from music,
asking what does it mean to play music in VR?
What are musical instruments?
What would they be like in VR and what are the artistic, humanistic, and
social implications of the medium of virtual reality.
Those are the kind of research questions that drive this and
all of these takes design, which is something I want to note first of all.
And it's something that every one of us do.
It's just something we humans do, it's also something that is all around us.
I wanna give you an example of something I designed when I
first got here at Stanford.
This is an app for your phone.
It's called Ocarina, [SOUND] and you play it like this.
[MUSIC]
I could keep going, thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> How does Ocarina work?
Well, it works by blowing into the microphone located at the bottom
of the phone.
For example, [SOUND] Pitch is controlled by the multi-touch screen,
[SOUND] And vibrato is controlled by the tilting the phone.
For example, [SOUND].
So this is the design of Ocarina and if you look at the design,
it's actually not complex.
It's made to be simple.
You don't actually see an Ocarina on the screen, you just see the functional parts,
the buttons and also the visualizations of your breath.
And there's a very specific reason for
that is that well, I don't want you to feel like your phone is emulating Ocarina.
I want you to feel that your phone has become and is the Ocarina, right?
I wanted to make the argument that what you're doing is a physical act and
this is a physical artifact.
This is Ocarina in game play mode.
[MUSIC]
You can see all the different elements on screen respond to your interactions.
It's a way to make this feel furthermore physical, it's an organic thing.
The circles of fall down the middle of your screen prompts here's how to play
the next note, this is kind of like Ocarina hero.
But unlike Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the sound is generated right on the device,
actually in the app I mentioned Chuck programming language.
And that means every time you play a song Ocarina,
you get to shape it to be your own.
It's a little different every time.
So it's both kind of a toy and a instrument but
there's another dimension to Ocarina and that is a social dimension.
In the same app, there is a visualization of a globe on which you can
listen to other people around the world, blowing through their phones.
[SOUND] from the East Coast, who are these people?
>> [LAUGH] >> Well, in this case, it's anonymous, and
that's actually part of the magic, right?
This is an app that's designed to not tell you who's on the other side.
And that's what makes you wonder.
This is an anonymous social network based on music.
It can makes you say hey who's that playing Legend of Zelda theme song from
Indonesia?
I think that question is actually more interesting when you don't answer it and
you can just think about it.
Now, if there's an underlying philosophy in the Ocarina,
it might be this, technology should create calm.
Let's think about this for a moment, right?
>> [LAUGH] >> This
isn't the statement that technology will solve all our problems or
technology is gonna create wealth, it might do both of those things.
Well, I don't know if it'll solve all our problems but this is an aesthetic ideal,
it's that technology might bring us some kind of inner peace.
Example, this is a review left in the App Store for Ocarina ten years ago.
This is my peace on Earth, I am currently deployed in Iraq, and
hell on Earth is an everyday occurrence.
The few nights I may have off, I am deeply engaged in this app, The Globe Feature,
that lets you hear everybody else in the world playing is the most
calming art I have ever been introduced to.
It brings the entire world together without politics or war.
It is the exact opposite of my life.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Deployed US Soldier.
Now, I can tell you that it feels really freaking good when anyone
use something that you've made.
But this was on a different level.
Something we made brought a moment of peace to another human being.
And there's something intrinsically valuable and good in that.
And this is to say that good design enables us, but
maybe, just maybe great design
is designed that seeks to understand something about who we are like art.
If you think about your favorite song, your favorite movie,
your favorite anything, right?
I don't think these things are great because you've understood how
great they are.
Because I think you feel like they've understood you as the person.
And can the things we make with technology try to understand who we are as humans,
as a society.
And this is what I really mean by artful design,
it's something we strive to do in everything we do.
For example, in building instruments for the laptop orchestra which consists of
humans, a lot of laptops sitting on audio interfaces, on a breakfast tray.
We sit on meditation mats and pillows and
we have special speakers that we've fashioned out of IKEA salad bowls.
>> [LAUGH] >> Why do we do that?
Well, we did that to make the sound emanate locally from the instrument,
from the computer that's actually generating it.
Why do we do that?
Well, because we value something still
about how traditional acoustic instruments make sound, they're physical.
If I were to play a violin in front of you on the stage, with amplification,
it would come from the artifact and not from the PA system.
There's something, well, valuable in that, and we want to kind of combine this thing
that we value with, of course, the new possibilities of the computer
to generate sound and make fantastical automation and new interactions.
This is just one of 200 pieces in the Laptop Orchestra that
has been performed to date.
This is a slot in concert hall, [INAUDIBLE]
[MUSIC]
This particular of our hand.
And when metaphorically pulling us down out of the ground.
[MUSIC]
And on the VR front,
this is a musical city designed by my PhD student Kung Woo Kim.
In this musical city well, dusk becomes night as the stars come out,
within the buildings come alive.
Like with music, every building can be controlled to affect
musical parameters and they all kind of vibe together
[MUSIC]
Now the Ferris wheel controls the tempo.
So now things are really starting to pick up.
[MUSIC]
And kinda see everything moves at their own musical pace.
Hey there's a plane in the background and there's gonna be car and vehicles.
[MUSIC]
And things really start livening up, and at some point, we go to the moon.
And on the moon, there are two rabbits.
Why are there rabbits on the moon?
I can't tell you, I don't think Kung Woo can tell you, but there they are,
making kind of a musical stew.
And from there a railroad track emerges and
on this railroad track track trains carrying musical chords start to flow.
[MUSIC]
I don't know about you, but this puts me at peace.
It brings a kind of calm, it makes me think you know what?
I wouldn't mind living this city.
I wouldn't mind living in a world that would have this kind of city, right?
And even UFOs come out of the sky and join in the chorus and
they play little marimbas.
[MUSIC]
And then in the night, everything peacefully turns off and
the next day is ready to begin.
Design is all about choices, right?
All of these things went through countless choices to be made and
I think what I wanna say is that, that means that actually we cannot help,
but really tackle this question.
How do we design ethically?
What does it even mean to design ethically?
When I think of ethics and
technology as well we don't wanna do harm, that's certainly necessary.
But do not evil actually
seems like a really low bar if that's your only bar, right?
Can we shape technology to proactively do good?
And what does good mean in that case?
For us we try to use this as a guiding question.
How do we want to live with our technologies?
How do we wanna live, period?
And how can we shape technology in ways that support
this kind of aesthetic vision, for the way things ought to be, and
just get a little bit closer to that ideal.
In this view, tomorrow's designers,
well, they have to be much more than a specialist.
But a kind of technological artist, a moral-ethical inventor.
And a system designer who not only builds the thing,
but really builds the thing with the understanding
of how that thing might fit into a greater system, into society, into our world.
In higher ed, you have the notion of an I-shaped student.
This is a student who specializes in just one discipline,
we're like, well, we don't want that.
So then, we're like, we should maybe like T-shape students.
You have some depth, you have some breadth.
I would like to talk about the Pi shaped student.
The Pi shaped student on one leg is a disciplinary expertise.
For example, computer science, on the other leg
is a kind of domain expertise something you apply your discipline to.
For me it was music, for someone it could be public health.
But this bar on top is what I would call the aesthetic lens,
is a philosophical, artistic moral lens that gives broader meaning and
context in bridging these two legs.
Is this not the kind of student we might wanna educate here at Stanford?
Is this not the kind of person we ourselves maybe wanna strive to be, right?
In a way, that is, I think, for me, kind of,
part of our educational mission is to really educate the full person.
The full citizens by giving them the tools with which to fashion themselves.
And we're doing this in a number of classes.
I teach this under a graduate class called Designs that Understands Us, right?
And by the way, I put all this into a comic book.
>> [LAUGH] >> Which starts in my office,
takes us to Bing and to various designs.
And by the way, this too is research.
The design of buildings, everyday things like pencil bags, visual design.
Instrument and interface design from the theremin to artificial
intelligence systems with humans designed into the loop.
Games is more than entertainment but a mode of expression in mode of reflection
to social design, design that connect us and the think about what are the values?
What do we really want from our social tools.
Just one final music example, this is a social karaoke app.
The was called karaoke and like Ocarina you could listen
to other people sing around the world but anyone who hears this can add
their voice in a plus one kind of way into this world anonymous chorus.
Now a woman reached out in the wake of the 2011 tsunami and
earthquake disaster and she, from Tokyo, sang a rendition of Lean On Me.
And she invited the world to join in song.
And in a matter of weeks, 4,000 people join in from all over the globe.
This is what it sounds like when it's about 1,000 people.
[MUSIC]
>> [APPLAUSE] >> So what does this all mean, right?
I think what it means is that the thinks we make today will come back to make us.
The things we design and shape technology, and how we do it will boomerang back and
shape us as individuals and as societies.
What we make, makes us.
And so, this in a nutshell is what I work on.
It's a kind of design for human flourishing, asking what it means for
us to flourish as individuals and as a society.
And this is artful design, thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE]