From Piano to Chinese Music Club: Dr. Huang makes friends with music and enjoys arranging music box melodies to heal souls.
Ming-Hsu Huang
From Piano to Chinese Music Club: Dr. Huang makes friends with music and enjoys arranging music box melodies to heal souls.
Ming-Hsu Huang
Hello, my name is Ming-Hsu Huang, a resident training in the hospital now. My work has nothing to do with music and I often have to stay in the hospital for the whole day and night, so music is the healing therapy for my mind.
My Music Learning Journey
My music learning journey started from my grandma’s persistence in developing kids’ music education. I grew up in my grandparents’ house before going to elementary school. My grandma was a music teacher before she retired. Living in a family caring about cultivating a kid’s music talent, I have learned piano for some years until the heavy junior high school study workload left me no more time for practicing it. I think what really made me start to have passion for music performance is from my school club’s experience in senior high school and college. I started to learn how to play pipa in high school and try to arrange my own music in college.
Because of the love for music, I met many friends from different fields, and most of them did not come from the music professional programs. The music clubs I attended helped me find many good friends and helped me find ways to relax from daily life. I think this kind of environment made me find the importance of music in my life. Music is the healing therapy for my mind and walked me from school life to work life to learn how to work as a team and how to deal with people from different backgrounds.
The Moment: I Decided to Purchase a Muro Box
I want to thank Hao-Chi, or I should call him “Teacher Jiang” because he is a professional performer of Ruan Xian. He is my friend’s music graduate program’s friend. Thanks to his invitation, I went to a DIY assembly class with him and that’s how I met the Muro Box.
I was enchanted by this product because I love auto-play music instruments and enjoy arranging my own melodies. After the DIY class, I downloaded the Muro Box App to test its music composing function for a while before I finally decided to purchase it. Unlike other customers who purchased the Muro Box as a customized gift for someone important, I want to purchase it mainly because it is a real musical instrument to me.
After I edited two melodies on its app and used livestream to watch the Muro Box-N20 Lite in the Muro Box Team’s office playing my own melodies, I decided to purchase it right away! At that moment, I just realized the infinity of music arrangement lies in one Muro Box!
Muro Box is like an automatophone!
For me, Muro Box is a self-playing instrument. I once discussed with my friends the nature of the music box. Whether its nature includes the exquisite craftsmanship, the wood carving, electroplating, inlay technology of the shell packaging, the protrusions arranged precisely according to the tune, and the tune-adjusted sound comb; or the meaning of the repertoire it carries, the companionship for family members, the promise for partners, and the promise for friends. blessings etc.?
I think Muro Box includes all of the above characteristics. It preserves the traditional music box’s sound principles and hence its sound quality is kept. In the craftsmanship aspect, the Muro Box Team carefully designed the laser engraving for my wood box based on my draft, so it becomes a perfect artwork showing craftsmanship. In the aspect of carrying the meaning of music, it has made an innovative breakthrough by integrating technology and user community community.
Playlist
Sharing My Experiences in Selecting What Melodies to Arrange for My Muro Box
“In Memory of” is my own creation, the original arrangement is a traditional Chinese chamber music that corresponds to Western music chamber music. I chose one of the more suitable motives for the whole song to do the adaptation. The original title was not “in memory of” but “Sweets Lullaby”, the setting was a cute and warm musical piece, and later when I met some changes in life, I changed its title to “In Memory of to lament the happy moments in the past.
Tsai Chin’s “The Last Night” is a gift for my grandma’s Mother’s Day. I recently started to ponder about how to rearrange some notes for better performance on the Muro Box. For example, I will consider: how to add variations, how to reduce music range to fit the music range of Muro Box N20, how to present the singer’s emotional changes with subtle temp adjustment, and how to present the sounds from string music instruments and vocals with a percussion instrument. For your information, I used vibraphone’s sound to test the result of my music arrangement when I edited this piece for Muro Box.
“Swan Lake – Dance of the Little Swans” is the first melody I arranged for the Muro Box. I picked this melody because I have attempted to edit its notation for playing on my pipa a few years ago. Hence, I only need to do some modification to shift tones and then it will completely match with Muro Box N20’s music scale. Then, I simply export its midi file to import it to the Muro Box app, and my Muro Box can play it!
I also tried to modify two Chinese musical instruments’ solos to see how the Muro Box presented them. The first song, “Give Me a Rose,” was written for Pipa; the other song, “Wine Fantasy” was written for old Chinese string musical instruments. The song “Give Me a Rose ” has fast-changing tones in Spanish scale and fast tempo, so some of its characteristics cannot present very well on the music box. The other song, “Wine Fantasy” uses a unique technique in the old Chinese string music instrument that is also hard to present on the music box. However, the Muro Box versions of these two songs still sound interesting because they become another style of music. I think this is an interesting sound experiment!
The Software I Used
The music programing software I used is called “MuseScore”, and its name sounds like “Muro Box” (what a coincidence!?) There is also a user community for MuseScore users to share their music sheets, and it is like the Muro Box community has many users create melodies to share publicly for global users to enjoy the music around the world, too! I used to use my computer to layout notes directly on traditional music sheets so that I can assign vocal parts according to their low, middle, and high music range.
For example, I occasionally use sextuplets to broken chords, polyrhythm 3:4 or 2:3, and the gradual acceleration(accelerado) and deceleration(ritardando) of dotted notes, etc.
Music and My Life
Working in a hospital requires precision, efficiency, prescribing the right medicine, and setting goals in everything. But music is for me, not a professional performer, and does not need to pursue the ultimate precision. With some emotional changes will even make a more beautiful piece of music. I don’t need to pursue the efficiency and goals for music arrangement, and I can simply create music in the way I want. There is no need to prescribe the right notation, because every note will not be commented as wrong, and each person’s careful arrangement can produce completely different styles of music. Therefore, the interest in music box arrangement and the profession of a doctor have enriched my life with different colors.
