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The common aim of Smule’s products is to prod nonmusicians into making music and to interact with others doing the same. There are singing apps like I Am T-Pain and Glee Karaoke, and digital versions of instruments like Magic Piano and Magic Fiddle. What connects these easy-to-use diversions to Wang’s more abstruse gear-tinkering is the exploration of expressive sound via technology: everyone can make music, he believes, and everyone should.

It’s hard to overestimate how much Smule’s strategy revolves around Wang himself. Before the first Project Oke demo, I asked another Smule employee what the app would consist of, how it would work. He shrugged. “Right now,” he said cheerfully, “it’s all in Ge’s brain.”

What marched out of Wang’s brain at that first Project Oke demo in July was a cute robot, singing and dancing. The app, now known as Sing, Robot, Sing!, is likely to be in Apple’s App Store early next year, depending on how quickly the final version moves through the approval process.

There it will join what has become a bewildering array of products in the “music” category. This includes services like Spotify and Pandora that are analogous to radio, and games like Tap Tap Revenge, which involve tapping dots on your phone’s screen in sync with songs. Artists routinely release phone and tablet applications that include remix-it-yourself options. Reality Jockey, based in London, has created “reactive music” apps that respond to sounds in the listener’s environment as well as user actions. There are sophisticated instrumentlike apps that require technical skill or musical knowledge to master, and apps that recreate that ultimate amateur form, karaoke.

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