When: 2017 – 2019
Where: EF Education First (Shanghai, China)
Who: A large team of academics, researchers, designers, illustrators, multimedia producers, software engineers, project managers, and many others working across offices in Shanghai, London, and Lucerne.
My Role: Music composition, arrangement, mixing, and mastering; app sound design; audio production; vocal direction; project management
About the Product:
Small Stars is EF Education First’s flagship English course for 3-5 year olds. This most recent product refresh involved a top-to-bottom revamp of the curriculum and materials. From a media production standpoint, this involved the creation of 31 classroom songs, 32 animated videos, an application, textbooks, thousands of academic audio files and dozens of pieces of extra musicand sound effects across the videos and app. It was a vast project—the largest in scope I ever worked on at EF—and it tested my music production and sound design skills.
Sound Design:
The Small Stars app includes hundreds of animated stickers that students collect on their learning journey. The artist on my team came up with diverse and imaginative animations for each of these; it was my job to pair them with creative sound effects. Using extensive foley recordings, custom synth patches, and intricate layering and sound sculpting techniques, I came up with a style that complemented the colour and liveliness of the animations.
Songs:
The classroom songs had strict academic requirements that informed every musical decision. This meant collaborating closely with academic, editors, and product owners. Every detail mattered: song lengths, tempo choices, pitch ranges, the ease of utterances on a suprasegmental level. Creating a rich and flexible arrangement style took a lot of iteration up front. The Hello Song itself (sung at the beginning of each lesson) involved me coming up with eight unique compositions before settling on piece that students now enjoy in classrooms across the world. Musical decisions always needed to take a back seat to the learning needs of little kids; the project required constant compromise on my part. But in the end the team was able to produce a set of songs that young learners love to sing in class and at home.