My Music Life

Frankly speaking, music has become more than a hobby to me. Instead, it integrated as part of my intellectual life. Studying piano at the age of two and violin at the age of six, my childhood was filled with classical music. As an enlightenment of my experience with music, Richard Clayderman and his collections accompanied my entire childhood.

Then pop music came to me. Starting to study singing while playing piano accompaniment at the same time with Owen, who led me into the grand garden of modern music, I started listening to twentieth century western pop music.

The solid foundation of music theory that I established through my piano and violin training helped me to adjust to and embrace this new format of music successfully and smoothly. Through this process, we were more than just student-and-teachers — we became close friends. I was, still am, and will also be genuinely grateful for him leading me into this beautiful world of music.

Then composing entered my life. Under Owen’s encouragement, I created my first piece, Grotesque, an attempt of creating an intense atmosphere through the utilization of strings — you are now hearing it as the background music. Since then, I have devoted myself to the creation of original pieces. After taking Music Theory and Music Composition courses offered at my high-school and participating in several professional training camps, I gradually got more and more familiar with those composing softwares such as Musescore and Digital Performer 11, and had recorded over twenty original pieces in my home studio.

Being introduced to John Cage and his ideology of “music is the art/measure of time”, I began thinking deeply and philosophically about the question: “what is music”. Trying to explore more about “nurtured” music, in contrast to the traditional “natural” music of human musicians mimicking sounds from nature through musical instruments, I dived into investigations about computer generated music and especially studied MuseGAN as well as deep neural networks. My ultimate goal is to compose with computer generated sounds — just as animation movies in the film industry — and to create purely synthetic music.

Of course, in the future, I would love to keep such a hobby of practicing, performing, composing, and inventing music. I am very much looking forward to devoting my entire life to “Grow With Music”.