Like many with dreams of entering the music industry, Li Xiao'an wanted to be a performing artiste. But the Singaporean found his calling in commercial composing instead, a field he says could do with more exposure.
SINGAPORE: Music composer Li Xiao’an describes his job on professional networking site LinkedIn as “music for whatever the hell you want”.
This “key misconception”, he suggested, is also “why parents would be so terrified for their children to embark on a music career, because you make it or you don’t”. In fact, he stumbled into it while studying for his undergraduate degree at Berklee College of Music in the US, where he grew more fascinated with “the technicality of music composition” and turned his focus to electronic production.
The game has seen a resurgence after the Tetris movie was released earlier this year. And scoring for an advertisement or creating new music is “very different” from working on a franchise that most people in the world recognise, he said. As the tracks in game music are “very short, but they repeat”, a player might hear the loop, for example, 50 times in the course of playing the game. When the same part comes around again, they might recognise it, so the structure has to be “a little bit more fluid”.
Typically, music is “intended to accompany some form of visual or narrative context”, he explained. “The job of music is not to really be descriptive of the action on the screen. It is to describe the unseen or unknown emotional context that is not obvious from the action.” “So when you hear it, you think of as being masculine. And men who want to feel masculine might gravitate towards that. So it’s a matter of understanding your audience.”
While doing his research, Mr Li realised there was “Latin influence” in the music for the original version of the commercial. It added to the sensual undertones of the commercial, which depicted a girl enjoying her Kinder Bueno chocolate bar while other shoppers looked on. Getting a clear brief applies to clients who are musicians too, although Mr Li doesn’t write a very detailed first draft “because I can count on their imagination”.
Like commercial work, understanding the intended emotions that the musician wishes to evoke is important. In this instance, Mr Li realised from listening to the lyrics on Slott’s track that it was devotional music.
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