Music Explorations

Preface

This portfolio is a collection of my music compositions and projects from 2021 to 2025. It presents my musical journey of mine with multiple forms of music and artworks, which include orchestral works, vocal music, piano improvisations, trombone concerto performances, and music with tech and coding.

Sky Lanterns (2025)

Project type: Live Symphony Performance, Composition

Location: Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall

"Sky Lanterns" is a soaring orchestral piece in the style of Disney movie scores, it evokes a sense of warmth and romantic emotion that paints the atmosphere of the sky illuminated by countless glowing lanterns. In this piece, I aimed to experiment with parallel motion (mainly 3rd and 5th) and parallel harmony, also creating interest by adding harmonic embellishments and counter melodies. Also, I highlighted the triplet rhythm within multiple melody lines as a rhythmic characteristic of this piece.

Audio Synthesis & Visualization (2023)

Project Type: Web demo

Location: Baltimore, Maryland 

This project is an exploration of the music tech area, experimenting with Java scripts and seeing what they can do to generate unique sounds and visuals. The user interface that can control synthesizers and create visual effects based on their waveform. I built it up based on Java coding, first creating the synthesizers that linked to the user’s input, this includes the waveforms, filter, frequency, and amplitude. Then the visual elements that correspond to the sounds reflect the changes inputted by the user so that they can experiment and play with both sound and visuals.

Trombone Performance (2022)

Project Type: Live Performance

Location: Shanghai, China

As a trombonist, solo performances are key to expressing your own understanding of a piece of music.

Concerto Marciale for Trombone is a classical piece composed for a trombone with a piano accompaniment in the 19th century by the composer O.Lange. It was written to show high contrast in dynamics and expressions which is supported by the breath control of the performer. So, the piece can be emotive and expressive to perform or to be listened to. The form of the piece is a concerto which can show the ability of the trombonist to cope with the accompaniment. Also, multiple modulations presented in the piece with complex rhythmic structures can show the technical proficiency of the performer. In addition, this piece contains a combination of performing with piano accompaniment and one trombone solo part, during the solo part the performer can improvise within the section, which gives the performer to show personal interpretations and understanding of the piece.

Emotions (2024)

Project Type: Song

Location: Baltimore, Maryland 

As a songwriter, music production isn’t limited to composing. In this album I’ve explored the whole workflow, from composing the song and lyrics to singing, recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering.

Blue (2021)

Project Type: Piano Improvisation