Sonic Mule (better known as Smule) , yes you have heard of it.  It's that lighter on an iPhone thing.

Take the time to look a little deeper, it's not what you think.

At first glance, Smule looks like nothing more than a cute little app.  If you take the time to look a little longer you will notice that you can extinguish the lighter by blowing on it or ignite a lighter by touching two iPhones together.  After that you will probably think  “okay it is a really cute little app”.  If you stop there you will have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Smule is more than just the really cute little app.  Much more.

Ever heard of ChucK?  That's not surprising.  ChucK is quite new. It's Smule's programming language created by co-founder Ge Wang during his doctoral work in the CS department  at Princeton.  It is, to quote the ChucK team:

 “…a new (and developing) audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and now, analysis…”

The ChucK language makes it  easy to have extremely accurate concurrent audio programming. This is particularly important to music , synthetic music means multiple tracks running at the same time and they all need to be synced. 

Once he created ChucK, Ge went on to use it to physically manifest one of his extremely creative ideas , the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.   After graduation Ge took a professorship at Stanford where he meet Smule co-founder Jeff Smith.  The two of them came up with the ideas for Smule and started the Stanford Laptop Orchestra.

So just what is a laptop orchestra?  The basic idea is to convert laptop inputs , keyboard, touchpad, and accelerometer motion , into sound.  In this way one can turn laptops into musical instruments

Guess what else has a touchpad and an accelerometer?  The iPhone. 

Just imagine the possibilities.  What if you could make – not just play , music on your phone? What if your friends could join in?  What if people all across the world had the ability to make and share music on their phones?

Well you can share the flame of the lighter.  You can ignite your lighter and then use it to ignite other lighters by bringing two iPhones close together. The signal between the two phones is an audio signal and this spark jumping from one person to the next is the beginning of the global Sonic Network. 

I will not attempt to paraphrase the eloquent phrasing of those who know the Sonic Network better than I do.  Instead I direct the reader to this Sonic Mule blog post which describes the vision behind the Sonic Network. 

New audio programming language, laptop orchestras, the Sonic Network , I told you it was much more than just a cute little app.