I grew up moving between cultures before I ever thought about sound. Born in Taiwan, raised in mainland China for fifteen years, then coming to the US for graduate school. By the time I got into sound design, crossing boundaries was already second nature to me.
I studied marketing as an undergrad, graduating from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, before shifting into sound design and earning my MFA in Sound Design from SCAD. The jump looks big on paper, but to me it’s one continuous line, because my background in marketing means I’m always asking the same question: what value does this actually create?
The moment sound first hit me wasn’t in a classroom. I was livestreaming as a singer at the time, and one day my sound engineer adjusted my vocals in real time using EQ. I heard frequency turn into emotion, right there. That’s when it clicked: sound was never just about sounding good. It was actively reshaping the value of something.
That realization became the core of what I keep coming back to: we tend to define Sound Design as one of two things, storytelling, or technical support. I think both definitions are too small. What sound design actually does is Value Creation: the emotion in a single line, the credibility of a piece of dialogue, a mix decision that makes an audience believe the story for one more second. None of that is just hitting a technical spec, or just telling a story. It’s creating value.
My focus now is dialogue editing, post-production workflow, and re-recording mixing. Moving between Taiwan, mainland China, and the US taught me to listen across languages and contexts before I ever learned to listen across frequencies, and that’s exactly what dialogue and localization work demands. Every decision I make comes back to the same question: what value does this choice create, for the story, the character, the audience?
I’m a 2026 MFA Sound Design graduate from SCAD, currently working independently as a freelance editor and mixer, still putting this idea into practice with every project.