Saying Hi and Talking About Music

Me and my world

I was born and raised in southern China. As a kid I spent most of my time on the piano, robotics stuff, skateboarding, rolling around on the floor like all kids do, and just school stuff. When it came the time for me to choose a college in China vs. a college in the states, I thought it'd be cool to spend 4 years in the country where skateboarding was invented, so I came to Lawrence. 

 

Filming Aloha!! Hangzhou!! , Summer 2016

Hangzhou, China

Growing up, my will-later-be-a-career thing has always been robotics programming, which later turned into physics.

                                          FIRST Robotics Competition 2017 Season ↑

                                                               FIRST Robotics Competition 2018 Season →

                                                                                         9-year-old me on the piano ↓

Even though I've been spending plenty time on the piano since I was 4, music has always been just something I purely enjoy and love (from the bottom of my heart) -- it's been a "home" to me even before I can remember things. I get it when McLuhan said "You can't go home again" (McLuhan 13), but I'm blessed to always have had a "home" to go called music.

Fast forward to 2021 -- I was on my way to live up to my childhood dream: becoming a theoretical physicist and perhaps one day help building anti-matter powered starships. (I still love Star Trek though) Well, one day the Chinese and the U.S. government decided to start a trade war -- as a Chinese STEM major student, I was being called a potential "intellectual property thief". I mean I get it that there's crazy stuff going on between the governments so I didn't really take it personally, but I knew that I have to reconsider my future: I wanted my career to have as little to do with politics as possible.

Well, what else can I do?

"You've spent basically your entire life doing music, why not something like film / video game composer?" Said my guitar professor, "I mean I've heard your stuff, I can totally see you doing well writing music!"

Thanks to the support from my guitar professor, my family, and my friends, I'm currently on this seemingly crazy, supposedly hard, but fun journey.

Scoring a horror short film at home, Summer 2022

Shenzhen, China

What I want to say as an artist

I figured I'd share my two cents on what, to me, is considered "good" music.

To me, "good" music is the right music. By right music I mean the music that gives people the feeling they crave for; the music that suits a movie scene so well that it becomes one of the things that makes the movie scene great; the music that suits a video game so well that it still lives in my head rent free til this day; in general, it's all about the context, how the audience feel about it, and if they relate to the music.

scene "Miller's Planet" from the movie Interstellar

 

Dungeon and Fighter, Boss Fight Theme @2:45