Liang Huan is a music producer, educator, and the founder of HEM, an independent music label. What followed a chaotic thirty-minute cold open was a long, unhurried conversation across twelve time zones about music, games, novels, and the question of why someone would pour twenty hours a day into something he believes in when it isn’t even the thing he loves most.
The Art of Putting Your Voice Out There
After the technical chaos subsides, we end up talking about voices. I confess I have never been confident in mine, that my rhythm is off and I interrupt too much. Liang Huan tells me the only fix is letting people hear it more. We compare notes on podcast hosts whose voices put us off at first and then became part of the appeal, and on the lost craft of pacing and emphasis that radio hosts and storytellers used to master. He uses this exact analogy in his own teaching: if you write drum patterns with no velocity variation, it is like someone speaking in a perfectly flat monotone. Nobody can listen to that.
Diablo, Stormlight, and What Refills You
The conversation wanders into Diablo 4, seasonal fatigue, and why I spent real money on a paladin armor set I will never actually use. We talk about the point at which professional strategy groups make casual game streaming pointless, and how Liang Huan still watches Warcraft III replays as a form of comfort. This leads to fantasy novels. He reads Chinese web fiction and trades recommendations with Ma Boyong. I have been deep in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive and Mistborn, reading every night before sleep because speculative fiction pulls you away from reality without triggering the restless ambition that business books do. We agree that the best moments in those stories are the quiet passages between the set pieces.
The Night HEM Was Born
Liang Huan’s original plan was to launch a music education program after producing a variety show. That fell through. He spent a few months streaming games on Bilibili, getting very good at inventing strategies for difficult stages in Arknights, until the arrival of organized guide-makers rendered his approach obsolete. During one of those streams, an anonymous viewer with a default username asked: why don’t you turn your music production skills into a course? That night he sat down and wrote a 180-lesson syllabus from beginning to end. The outline barely changed afterward. The actual content took seven or eight months to produce, but the shape of the whole thing came from one evening.
The curriculum is split roughly between aesthetic training and technical instruction. Before each lesson a song is played that relates to the day’s topic, building a minimum listening foundation for students who might never seek out music on their own. The hardest thing to teach through MIDI is bass. It enters early in a track, it is a single-note instrument, and it exposes everything. Most of the time the problem is tone; the rest is groove. Liang Huan says the gap comes from not having listened to enough music, and that no shortcut can replace the judgment built from tens of thousands of hours of accumulated listening. This is also why HEM insists on live instruction over prerecorded video, and why each cohort forms a community where former students help answer questions in real time.
Covers, AI, and One Song Called DIAO
We talk about the collaboration between HEM and Dine on album artwork. Designers on our team split a batch of new releases, listen to each track, let an image form, then work with AI to render something from that impression. Liang Huan tells his artists that once they hand the cover to Dine, they should not ask for revisions, because the designer’s interpretation is its own creative act laid on top of the music. We find it unexpectedly poetic, both sides. One upcoming release, incidentally, is a track titled DIAO, which is exactly what you think it is.
When we get to AI, the segment is shorter than usual. Liang Huan has no AI in his production or teaching workflow. The one place he sees genuine value is what the host has been hinting at throughout: AI as a tool for controlling software like Ableton, handling tedious technical operations directed by someone who already knows exactly what they want. That is computer-use-level automation, not creation. He agrees this is useful and says electronic musicians should have been the earliest adopters of this kind of assistance. The catch is that you need enough musical foundation to describe the instruction precisely. He tells students who feel outpaced by Suno that anyone under five years of experience is probably not as good yet, but with enough time they will surpass it, and more importantly, they will know how to improve what they hear.
Twelve Hours Apart
We end up on dopamine, vibe coding, and the death of the old joke about the entrepreneur who just needs a programmer. As we wrap up, Liang Huan asks: does every conversation really need to circle back to AI? Maybe the more interesting thing is what it makes room for.
Mentioned in this episode
- HEM: music label and education platform
- Brandon Sanderson: The Stormlight Archive, Mistborn, Skyward
- Ableton Live
- Suno and Splice
- Cire.fm: a music discovery project by the host
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor
- Boards of Canada