More than one way to 'make it' in music: Singaporean composer on creating music for video games, commercials

SINGAPORE: Music composer Li Xiao’an describes his job on professional networking site LinkedIn as “music for whatever the hell you want”. 

It isn’t exactly hyperbole. Among his myriad clients, the 35-year-old Singaporean has scored a Kinder Bueno TV commercial, worked on an e-card with a Mother's Day message from the Queen for greeting card company American Greetings, and collaborated with a rapper for a jingle about sustainability for Parkroyal Collection under Pan Pacific Hotels Group. 

He has also worked on a “really strange student animation project featuring the seven deadly sins and ceilings made of breasts”, he shared in a LinkedIn post about seven months ago alongside a clip of the soundtrack. 

In his spare time, he once wrote a score titled “Indiana Jones gets attacked by Darth Vader at the Olympics” just for fun. 

An avid user of LinkedIn, Mr Li frequently writes on the social media platform to raise awareness about his job. The founder and composer at audio company Li & Ortega – comprising a small international team of music, voice and audio production veterans – has after all worked on diverse projects.

But he didn’t start with a dream to go behind the scenes. 

LACK OF AWARENESS, EDUCATION 

Like many in Singapore with dreams of entering the music scene, Mr Li wanted to take centre stage. Becoming a performer or recording artiste is a common goal, as people tend to believe “there’s only one or two ways to make it” in the music industry, he told CNA. 

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”.  

Such misunderstandings could also exist because there is “a complete lack of visibility” for his profession in the first place, not least due to the difficulty of getting “a good education in the specific field of composing commercially”, he added. 

“I think that in Singapore, we still have the idea that if you're a composer, you compose concert music and so they will encourage you to learn classical music. But I know a lot of people who compose classical music … They have great work but they wouldn’t be able to do my job.” 

Creating a more competitive environment for commercial composers, Mr Li believes, could begin with “even showcasing it as a career option”. 

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.

“At the time, I thought that the barrier to entry in writing for games was fairly low. Not that many people were into it, compared to, say, people who wanted to score films. But then everyone flocked to Hollywood to score for, like, two films, and no one would get it because (award-winning film score composer) Hans Zimmer would get all of it,” he recalled, laughing.

“So I tried to take the skills that I had and try to find the lowest barrier to entry for me to actually start working for clients.”

WRITING MUSIC FOR VIDEO GAMES

Mr Li’s foray into video games worked out. His team’s collective sound effects, voice and other game audio contributions to date include popular video game series Unreal and Call Of Duty, as well as mobile games. 

Currently reworking the Tetris theme song for an upcoming mobile game based on the renowned puzzle game for PlayStudios, he was “very excited” when the opportunity came his way. 

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. 

“When I heard the name Tetris, I was like, you’re kidding right? Not only is the game really iconic, the music is really iconic …. It’s actually a Russian folk song,” he told CNA excitedly. 

“If you’ve played Tetris and you’ve heard the music, it’s quite intense. So I had to take that and turn it into something that was a little less stressful. It’s intended to induce a sense of relaxation and casual play.” 

Unlike music for an advertisement, which could be intended to evoke emotions, music for mobile games is often “not too jarring or have parts that are too distinctive”, explained Mr Li. 

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”.

“You can’t write it in the way that you would write a standalone track. You have to take into account the experience of the player – they might just be wanting to relax,” he said. 

That was in fact part of the brief when Mr Li composed music for mobile game Longleaf Valley which gets players to contribute to reforestation through their tokens earned. 

“The brief was to sound outdoorsy. They wanted it to sound like we were in an American National Park. But they didn’t want it to sound too obviously American. In the sense that … there’s not too much bluegrass, but some of those influences,” he added. 

“This is very often the case. People want a specific sound, but they don’t want it all the way.”

HIGHLIGHTING HIDDEN EMOTIONS, CONTEXT

Much of Mr Li’s work involves teasing out the specifics from clients about what emotions or hidden context the music is intended to convey, rather than using “particular beats that suit specific types of industries”. 

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.” 

Take romance scenes in movies and TV shows for example. “There are many ways to portray a love scene with the action, but what music you put behind really changes the context,” he said.

“Let’s say you have a generic love scene. If you used some light piano music, that’s tenderness. If you had soaring strings that were very intense, then you might have a more passionate kind of love,” he added. 

“And if you had no music, just some low notes going on in the background, it’s very unsettling. That might illuminate that somebody has hidden intentions.” 

When music is used to highlight hidden context, “you’re not meant to notice the music and then think about it”, he added. “It’s supposed to go straight to your amygdala and then you instinctively realise something’s going on here (in the scene).” 

A similar understanding applies to commercials, where music can be used to tap into a psychological desire. For example, cars that are marketed to men “tend to use heavy rock guitar, because for a long time, the guitar was a very gendered instrument”, said Mr Li. 

“So when you hear it, you think of (the car) as being masculine. And men who want to feel masculine might gravitate towards that. So it’s a matter of understanding your audience.”  

But pinpointing the perfect track often requires asking a lot of questions because then clients are “forced to clarify their needs and intent”, he added. 

“If they say they want it to sound upbeat, there are many styles of music that are upbeat. That’s not specific enough for me. Do you mean upbeat in the sense of playful? Do you mean upbeat in the sense of high energy like we’re having a party? And if we’re having a party, is it the kind where you have a mosh pit or where you’re partying in a nightclub?” he explained. 

“Asking those questions helps me to narrow down the style, the energy, the instrumentation.” 

Mr Li didn’t always ask many questions, however. He highlighted one of his first few advertising projects – a Kinder Bueno TV commercial that was a remake of its original version – where he felt the brief was “possibly incorrect or not ideal”. Nothing he tried felt right, so he submitted two soundtracks in the end. 

The first was a demo of house music based on their brief, while the second was “based on my understanding of what the video was conveying”. 

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. 

“It was kind of voyeuristic … There was something inherently, shall we say, passionate about that. So I decided to incorporate more Latin influences and used tango instead, which was nothing like (the brief) they had sent me. And they ended up going for it,” he said. 

The experience taught him that “sometimes, you have to think really hard about what the client actually needs rather than what they tell you”, he added.  

“Because if you just do what they tell you, I've learned that that's a recipe for a lot of frustration, because they're also relying on you for your interpretation and expertise. You're not just a factory.” 

ARRANGING SONGS FOR ARTISTES 

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”.  

For example, when he was approached by Irish singer Luke Slott to arrange music for his album and include a string quartet, his job was “to take what he sent me, which was piano and vocals, and write around his composition to support his voice and add colour to the piece of music”. 

“So what I did was I created an electronic representation of the parts that I wanted to be recorded. This was a way for us to iterate on it without actually going to the studio and recording musicians,” he shared. 

“After we were done with (the collaborative editing process), we recorded live string players. I monitored the recording sessions remotely on Zoom; I would tell the player to play things a certain way, like not too much vibrato here, can we make this part a little bit more tender, can we make this part a little brighter.” 

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.

“It’s not meant to be clever. It’s meant to induce a sense of meditative reflection in a listener. For that reason, I cannot write selfishly. I have to write in a way not to showcase my ability, not even to showcase his ability, but to create a particular mood of reflection and worship,” he said.

The active string melodies come in when he’s taking a break from singing to “tickle the ears so you have a balanced experience”, explained Mr Li. “Meditative reflection is something that has to be constant. You’re not trying to create drama.” 

Explaining that his job as an arranger when he works with artistes and songwriters is “to take a piece of work that’s already great and elevate it as high as I can, without changing the intent of the music”, he added. 

“Typically they come to you with something that’s complete in the structure, but it needs to be fleshed out instrumentally. That’s generally what an arranger does. They will listen to the music and find out: How can I add value? When should I shut up? It’s a delicate balance.” 

While Mr Li might not be a performer today, the “B2B (business-to-business) side” of the music industry is “also difficult to break in for a different reason”. 

He believes that performing artistes are an “all-encompassing product” where their looks and personal story also play a part in their success from the get-go. A music composer, on the other hand, has to often rely solely on their technical expertise to get far. 

“If I couldn’t do what I do right now, and if I was still early on (in my career), no one would want to hire me. Because the stakes are so high; an ad could cost hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars to make. The fee is not insignificant, but they only want to give it to people that they find reliable,” he said. 

And Mr Li has built up a reliable reputation of sorts, at least according to one of his clients.  

Local jazz artiste Joanna Dong approached him to arrange a Hokkien song (“huan xi jiu hao” in Mandarin), because she wanted it arranged in “a very specific way”.

“(The song's time signature) is very weird because normally where there are four beats in a bar, here there are seven. The first part is four, then it goes to seven. So it feels like you’re tripping over yourself,” he said. 

The final rendition combined “old-school” American dance music with the dizi (Chinese flute) and an opera gong at the end. 

When Dong came to him, she said: “It’s a very weird arrangement so I decided to call you”, he recalled with a laugh, “because I had become known for doing weird (things like that)”. 

Living up to his LinkedIn job description, he told her: “Whatever you’re paying, I’ll do it.”