Music composer/Video game soundtrack artist Annette Wong. By Olivia Luo

Random-storykeeper — Wong’s Youtube name

Annette Wong is a 3rd-year music major student with a 3-year biology background at Simon Fraser University. She has always had a passion for music since she was young and decided to completely immerse herself in it. She is interested in gaming video soundtracks and has done many music competitions online. She found that music theory is interesting because it changes every time and it’s not always stagnant in terms of the way that it is taught even with the people you talk to in the class.

Wong says that music has taught her many things such as the importance of teamwork. And right now she joined a team online where she helps create soundtracks for video games or game jams that “usually take 3 days” to make and they “meet up once a month”.

Her recent interests in video game soundtracks gave her experiences she’d never had. She said she gets inspirations for music by identifying herself with certain characters in the game not entirely but at the moment of the situation. Music had not only opened her world into the music communities, but it was a great way for her to grow and receive feedback from her fellow musicians and artists on certain platforms. She enjoyed giving and getting ratings and reasoning behind all the decisions musicians or artists would have to make. It helped her realize the difficulty of working in a team because the various different envisions the people have within the team from different disciplines. So it is “important to find people who have a similar goal” or focus because it tends to be harder to collaborate with other music composers or artists especially when “everyone wants a piece” in the composition. Sometimes “it is fun to not do that and think of it as a challenge”. “But to have a clear focus, you sort of have to accept that they don’t have the same vision as you and have to compromise,” says Wong.

Why music?

As mentioned before Wong has always connected with music since she was young and she grew up in a family of musicians and learned piano as a toddler. She loves how music has structure and kinda like almost like another language (in terms of like notations), it communicates and it holds a lot of room for creativity and self-expression. Music personally gave her ups and downs but it became something she ultimately always falls back to no matter the case.

Is music lonely? Especially when everything is online?

Wong says working on something personal or working on a project such as for a music competition, you have to be willing to follow through which takes up time so in terms of working by yourself you might feel lonely because you need space and certain workflow. However, looking at it another way. “Good time management in production really helps with deadlines which is important so you can be more versatile.” “But it’s also important to make time for yourself” so you can do the things you love too.