Final Project

Project Overview

The Tianyu Project’s long-term vision is to publish the current Chinese fantasy comic series Tianyu by artist Xinchang Yin. Then, if the Chinese audience widely accepts the comic, the series will be animated after three to five years. My role is composing and producing theme soundtracks for the narrative. In the short term, my works will be used as background music for promotional videos, which is the objective form of my final product attached above.

The story happens in ancient China. The protagonist had the aspiration to avenge the demons and the Protoss, who had defeated the humans’ country. He will encounter the love of his life in the early years, but never be able to meet again. Although he will develop a myriad of friendships, construct a strong army, accomplish the initial aspiration of avenging the adversary state, and bring peace to the world, he still can’t meet his love again due to irresistible forces. The avenge and melancholic love are the main themes. The music should depict such narrations and have a unified traditional Chinese style.

I was fortunate to work in his art education organization, MENZEL Art Education, as a poster designer and childcare teacher in the summer for two years. I deeply admired his creativity and proficiency (See Appendix 0). He also appreciates some of my compositions. Therefore, I asked him whether I could write for this series without any charges, since it’s a personal but professional project. As he agreed, this online collaboration was initiated in November 2025.

Final Product

Chronological Monthly Diary

Planning details have been handwritten as diaries in my notebook (See Appendix 1.1)

January 2026
- Find reference tracks that fit with the comic style.
- Find arrangement resources and take notes on rules.
- Try to keep the musical and physical practice routine and recover from psychological burnout since Christmas.
Febuary 2026
- Finish the composition of the Festival Theme and Love Theme, and conduct a progress report with the artist.
- Find MIDI Programming resources on how to achieve expressive and realistic sounds from sound libraries, especially East West.
March 2026
- Primarily cover and learn musical form, harmonic progressions, and orchestration techniques from reference tracks; then, incorporate them into the Festival Theme’s arrangement
- Conduct a monthly progress report session with the finished composition draft of Love Theme and Main Theme.
- Finish a time elapsed video demo with a maximum length of under 2 minutes.
- Request a video recording of the artist’s drawing process
April 2026
- Conduct a monthly progress report session with the finished arrangement of the Festival Theme, Love Theme, and Main Theme.
- Primarily investigate both the harmonic structure, musical form, and arrangement technique of the trio version of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and the Last Emperor scores.
- Finish mixing and mastering (Space mastering and mixing sessions for at least one day)

Evidence of Planning/Process

Retrospective planning was adopted as the essential methodology throughout the entire project. It requires dissecting the goal into viable steps and evenly scheduling according to the scale of the month, week, and day (Association for Psychological Science – APS, 2025). This project was dissected into five phases.

The initial plan was to produce one theme song for the Tianyu Project and one underscore for an animated film project with undergraduate students at Leeds Art University. Although few contacts were conducted with Xinchang Yin, both of us would always show great excitement and provide constructive suggestions for each other’s work whenever we communicated online. The plan wasn’t changed until the beginning of phase three after the Christmas Holiday. Due to psychological burnout, the work was delayed. Meanwhile, I realized that the animated film project couldn’t be determined until the 18th of March, and my SS3 plan was also stuck. Therefore, under the time pressure, I decided to fully engage with the Tianyu Project, which I proposed to write three 4-minute theme scores. The green chart on page 2 below reveals the actual execution. The light area shows that the arrangements have taken more than 2 months (phase). I was struggling to tackle mostly with recordings and arrangements of three tracks in the SS3 project since the songwriter was having frequent communications with me, since we live together. This shows the weakness of online collaboration, which lacks contact, pressure, and energy. Despite all, when I sent him the finished drafts of the compositions, he was greatly inspired. He told me that although it’s tough, he won’t give up because the songs have moved his heart (See Appendix 4).

Fortunately, in the last phase, the arrangement skill accumulated from the daily practice routine, the SS3, and the film contextual study project vastly enhanced my efficiency. The music style and themes were depicted properly.

Final Project GANTT CHART Download

Primary References

Two primary learning approaches were applied: covering and analyzing reference tracks, and obtaining theoretical knowledge directly from books and tutorials.

The greatest learning outcome from examining reference tracks was the approaches towards variations of leitmotifs. Only one to two major leitmotifs will be used throughout the track. However, the melody can be varied, doubled, or simply played by different instruments, sometimes in a different register. Chordal or part(s) accompaniments can change voicings, articulations, or harmonic progressions. Applying distinctive combinations of given instruments can be effective in bringing new textures. Regarding the instrumentation, I found that the piano and strings are the essentials in the majority of the time. Therefore, based on that, I experimented to incorporate western orchestral instruments, such as flute, English horn, and xylophone, with Chinese traditional instrumentations such as Guzheng, Guqin, Ruan, Kong bass drum, and Gong cymbal. The effect is satisfying with strings and piano blending with other elements.

Since those tracks will potentially be utilized and rearranged for Tianyu’s animated version, it’s important to understand the function of the score for the picture. As the great American TV and film director Paul Wendkos said, the score reinforces the visual and narrative experience. Scores should provide emotional support and naturally become a part of the narration process. This reveals that the composer should comprehend the exact feeling that the director demands for specific scenery or theme (Karlin and Rayburn Wright). Therefore, I have discussed with the artist about the core emotions that each theme song should contain (See Appendix 4). This determined the creative direction and prevented unnecessary revisions.

Learning and practicing theories from the Beginners Guide to Composition attached below has strengthened my ability to efficiently experiment with harmonic progressions, voicings, and modulations. Before Christmas, the composition module in my practice routine included practicing major theories in this book. Without its theoretical guide, I won’t be able to maintain creativity under the time pressure at the end of the project.

otozawamezata《面向初学者的作曲课程》学习笔记 Download

Since MIDI Programming was the major approach to obtaining musical materials, I won’t be able to achieve any expressive and natural sound without the book Acoustic and MIDI Orchestration. It directly helped me to form the workflow that resolved the file corruption accident at the end of the project, which I used only four days to rearrange and record everything from zero.

acoustic-and-midi-orchestration-pejrolo-andrea-derosa-richar Download

The Master of Hand Book taught me that loudness is closely related to frequency. Particularly, low-frequency sound waves require more energy to achieve the same perceived loudness as higher frequencies around 4 kHz. This is the key to understanding and manipulating the presence and depth of any sound, as well as achieving a balanced and appropriately loud master.

F_Alton_Everest_The_Master_Handbook_of_Acoustics Download

Use of Technology

In fact, this project was fully incorporated with MIDI programming and sampling without any musician recording. Although both audio recording and MIDI recording are powerful approaches to obtaining magnificent performances, only MIDI recording was applied, which is distinctive from my musician recording-heavy SS3 Project. There are two primary reasons that led to this decision. The most significant reason was that I wanted to take this opportunity as a contingency preparation for future low-budget projects. I have to admit that the quantity of large-budget projects will always be less than that of low-budget ones. Therefore, the ability to thrive in both situations could extend both longevity and vitality of my future career. Most importantly, the skills to yield high-quality productions with both MIDI and audio recordings are highly transferable in various music careers, especially for my target media composers and music producers. The secondary reason was that I was less motivated to network with Chinese traditional musicians in Leeds, due to the primary career contingency consideration. In fact, approximately 70 percent of the materials in my SS3 project were collaborated with my fellow drummer, songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist.

Regarding the mixing and mastering decisions, a minimal approach was adopted. Most of works were done for the balancing and dynamic control process. Since all instruments were programmed by MIDI, the dynamic expressivity and consistency have to be done by manipulating Note Velocity, Expression (Xfade dynamic layers), and Vibrato through MIDI CC (Control Change). The workflow involves three steps: recording with the MIDI Keyboard (while controlling expression and vibrato with faders), velocity revision, MIDI CC revision, and volume automations (See Appendix 9). Velocity should always be treated first after a general expression level is set regarding each section, since it directly determines the timbre of the note. The expression or continuous dynamic level should be treated since it provides flexible dynamic controls, which are the key to achieving expressive and natural performances that are similar to excellent real-life recordings. Then, vibrato may be revised to create greater dynamic tensions. Finally, volume automations could be considered to supplement the dynamic range. For example, a soft timbre could be desirable in a ff section. Instead of resigning to a harsh sound with high velocity and expression, leveling up with volume automation should be more suitable.

Compressions are applied only to shape transients of bass drums and toms. EQs are mostly used to attenuate unpleasing frequency ranges, such as 300-800Hz muddiness or high-end spikes of piano, cellos, and low drums, while enhancing characters. Such a simple mixing approach was a stylistic choice. As Bhupinder always said in production hub sessions, context should always be prior to decisions (See Appendix 3). The artist wanted natural sound. Simply velocity and dynamic automations incorporated with chronic EQ and transient shaping compressions are enough. However, creative processing could still be played. To obtain analogue warmth and reasonable effects for those acoustic sounds, Tape machines were applied as bus processes in various ways. The most interesting approach was automating the feedback parameter of tape delay (See detailed demonstration in Appendix 9.4). This created a special flowing space with great depth, which is perfectly compatible with the nostalgic and ethnic style in the first theme song. Furthermore, to obtain rich sound textures, both patch doubling and sample layering were adopted. Patch doubling was mostly used to thicken strings by adding section patches with solo patches in the same library or direct doubling from distinctive libraries (See Appendix 9.1). Sample layering was primarily used to introduce tight body and light transients to drums (See Appendix 9.2).

Additionally, I chose Cubase as my main DAW because I particularly prefer the track lane function, which can function as a take folder for MIDI tracks.

Evaluation

First, the traditional Chinese musical style across all soundtracks has been satisfactorily achieved, based on feedback from the artist (See Appendix 4) and peer musicians (See Appendix 6). In fact, writing Chinese traditional music was unprecedented for me. Instead of being limited to my past writing experience in electronic, jazz, pop, and classical music, I sought out relevant OSTs and studied instrumentation, harmonic structure, approaches to variation, and performance styles. Most importantly, each track has properly depicted the corresponding themes. The use of extended voicings, Chromatic IV-III-bIII-II-I progression, the Lydian II Dominant, and the Mixolydian bVII harmony depicted the melancholic and fantasy nature of the worldview in the Main Theme. The 4th note piano and cello stabbing C section specifically depicts conflicts and combat from a detached inspector’s perspective. The Love theme incorporated mostly extended voicings, similar chromatic progressions, and heartbreaking IVm color from the parallel minor. The festival theme adopted more syncopated rhythms under a faster tempo with diatonic IV-III-II-I and I-VI-IV-V progressions to depict the hilarious and tranquil atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the project has crashed. On Thursday afternoon, the 23rd of April 2026, I finished 80 percent of the arrangement of all three tracks (See Appendix 7). However, when I tried to finalize the last track at night, the project kept being corrupted unexpectedly. The reason was that the information of the three tracks made the one project file overloaded. Hopelessly, I decided to redo everything. This will be the first and the last time for me to produce more than one track in a single project.

However, tremendous growth has happened. Without this accident, I wouldn’t have condensed the complete production process into tangible steps (See Appendix 8). I used to spend more than one month on any single track, but now I can produce 3 complicated masters within only 4 days from zero. The formation of my workflow under such extreme conditions surprisingly strengthened my working efficiency. This will enhance my learning efficiency when covering reference tracks and improve my adaptability and resilience to survive in my future professional career.

Due to extreme time pressure, the mix couldn’t be examined in a controlled studio monitor system. The headphone mix could potentially mislead me into overdoing the bass boost and narrowing the width. Admittedly, despite the project corruption accident, the actual execution had already deviated from the plan since the Christmas Holiday. As shown in my Kolb’s reflections (see Appendix 1.2), my psychological issue was the key trigger. This can be resolved by practicing fundamental skill sets, such as playing in time, practicing voicing of basic harmonic structures, etc. Becoming proficient directly resolves my self-abasement when feeling inferior to great musicians.

Lastly, from my personal perspective, this experience was intense but valuable. The pressure pushed me to advance the production workflow and would prevent me from making the same mistakes in future careers. In fact, my abilities to plan and develop a long-term project have tremendously improved this semester. The most significant yield was realizing the importance of basic practices. This led to the construction of my practice routine. Also, through experimentation and Kolb’s reflections, I learned that focusing on one aspect, such as arrangement or mixing, for 4 weeks, is particularly effective for improvement. The only drawback was the psychological burnout. It has broken my physical training routine and practice routine since mid-December. To overcome this in the future, I will keep cultivating fundamental skill sets and learning to appreciate marginal gains consistently.

Regarding the collaboration process, improvements can be made to future projects. First, a lack of pressure and energy was observed from online collaboration due to the absence of frequent contact. I felt less motivated when neither of us had reported any progress for weeks. Thus, the periodic meeting I planned in the feasibility research was aborted. However, Kolb’s reflection cycles were fulfilled in each phase, which helped me to resolve psychological burnout and improve fundamental arrangement and mixing skills. Since I will go back to China during the summer, frequent in-person meetings are going to be feasible. Also, without pressure from other projects, I’m confident of yielding better results. Meanwhile, Kolb’s cycle will be continuously used as a habit to resolve upcoming problems.

In addition, the current video length might be tedious and ineffective for social media promotion. Thus, 1 to 3 minutes elapse clips could be attractive to more potential audiences. A demonstration short was attached to Appendix 10.

Extensions

Since the artist felt pleased with the quality of our final product and the process of our collaboration, we have decided to form a long-term partnership. My next mission is to explore the theme of combat, personal growth, hope, and motivation. At the same time, I have to investigate approaches to improve my mixing skills, so that my productions can fulfill a professional media composition standard. Apparently, practices of dynamic control, including automation manipulations and dynamic processing, can be initiated by using the current project’s arrangements. Becoming stable at balancing across the whole track is essential for saving creative energy. In the next three to four theme songs, I will collaborate with traditional musicians to record real instruments. I will also start to learn Guqin and buy a condenser microphone, such as C414 or C451, during the summer, to explore authentic sound textures.

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