“Your Body Won’t Lie”: Composer Yuxuan Liu’s Case for Writing Music From Experience, Not Formula

Partway through a long conversation on the Mandarin-language channel Parallel Voices, Los Angeles composer Yuxuan Liu stops explaining himself and just states the rule. “You can explain 100 reasons,” he says, “but your body doesn’t lie.”

It is the closest thing he has to a thesis, and he has built a working method around it. Liu — who also releases work under the name Keene Leo — calls that method Experiential Composition: write from inside the story rather than applying music to it from the outside, and use your own physical response, not your theoretical justification, as the test of whether a cue is any good. Still in his mid-twenties, with credits spanning short films, concert halls in three countries and a scoring stage in Budapest, he has enough of a body of work to argue the point from evidence rather than sentiment.

At a glance

• Who: Yuxuan Liu (Keene Leo), screen and concert composer
• Based: Los Angeles; born in Guangyuan, China, in 2000
• Trained: Composition and music engineering, Sichuan Conservatory of Music; graduate study in Composing for Visual Media, Los Angeles College of Music
• Writes for: Film, television, video games, concert hall and interactive art
• Signature idea: “Experiential Composition” — music written from lived, bodily experience rather than from technical formula
• Recent highlight: Composed and conducted Sigh of Spring’s Farewell with the Manila Symphony Orchestra, Aliw Theater, June 28, 2025

The recording session in Beijing that settled it

Liu traces the decision to a competition he lost.

In his sophomore year at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, a scoring competition was posted in his composition department’s group chat. He entered. He did not place. What he did instead was travel to Beijing and volunteer at the event so he could stand in the control room while the five finalists recorded their cues with a live orchestra — musicians sight-reading behind studio glass, a score becoming sound in real time.

He describes it in the Parallel Voices interview, in Mandarin, with a directness the subtitles preserve: watching that session, he decided he was going to do this for the rest of his life. “The sense of fate is really huge,” he says.

It is a telling origin story for a composer who now argues that feeling should lead. The formative moment was not a grade, a prize or a technique. It was a room.

When writing music felt like doing homework

What came next was the part he is unusually candid about. Academic composition training, as he describes it, prized rational, avant-garde construction — sequence checking, theoretical apparatus, work in which, he says, “audibility is not that important” and pleasing a listener is beside the point.

He could do it. He just could not stand doing it. “When I wrote, it felt like solving questions,” he says of that period — like working through maths problems. “My writing process would be suffering.” Producing music by formula, he adds, left him with something close to guilt, because it had not come from any feeling he actually had.

The correction was not a rejection of craft; it was a reordering of it. After years immersed in deliberately complex music, he found that playing a plain major triad could land harder than any of it — not because the triad is sophisticated, but because it triggered a real response. He also draws a line most conservatory graduates blur: creation and analysis are different jobs, and doing both at once ruins the first. “Creators should be doing creative things,” he says. “There are special analysis people to analyse. You can’t create and analyse at the same time.”

What “Experiential Composition” actually asks of him

Liu settled on the word experience — 体验 — as the one that captures it. In practice, Experiential Composition is less a style than a gate he puts in front of his own work. Before technique gets a vote, the question is whether the material has produced an actual sensation in him: “Have I experienced the kind I want? Can feelings trigger my senses?” If the answer is no, he treats the idea as not ready, regardless of how well built it is.

That is where the body comes in. A composer can always assemble a defence of a passage after the fact — the voice leading is sound, the orchestration is idiomatic, the harmonic rhythm supports the edit. What a composer cannot manufacture is the involuntary physical response. So Liu uses the response as the instrument of measurement and the argument as a distant second.

It also changes how he talks about quality. He is notably unwilling to grade art. “I never evaluate by good or bad,” he says. “More is whether I like it or not, that’s all.” The corollary is the more interesting half: the passages that make a composer uncomfortable are often the ones worth keeping. Something you feel bad about, he suggests, may be the most valuable part.

Working across disciplines is what keeps the method honest. Collaborating with directors, game developers and visual artists, he says, forces a macro view and stops a composer disappearing into the microscopic — the harmonic puzzle, the plug-in chain, the DAW trick. Dialogue with other makers is the fuel, in his phrasing: 燃料.

The work: Manila, Franklin Hills, Budapest

The method has been tested in rooms with real orchestras in them.

On June 28, 2025, the Manila Symphony Orchestra performed Liu’s Sigh of Spring’s Farewell at the Aliw Theater in Manila, on a Season 99 concert programme billed as “A Night in Hollywood.” Liu both composed and conducted it. Footage of the performance shows a full symphonic complement — strings, winds, brass, percussion, harp and grand piano — under hard white light, playing a piece that opens lyrical and unhurried before building through sweeping string writing and prominent brass into a genuinely climactic finish. His conducting is expressive rather than metronomic: a clean baton in the right hand, the left shaping phrase and dynamic. The applause starts before his arms are down.

Six weeks later, on August 16, 2025, his string quintet Zagler received its world premiere in Franklin Hills, Los Angeles — a room-scale performance with the audience close enough to touch the players, which is about as far from the Aliw Theater as a composer can get without changing continents.

The third room was one he was not in. For the third edition of the Score the World film-scoring competition, Liu rescored the animated short The Boy Who Played Outside — a wordless parable in which an anthropomorphic smartphone walks a boy on a headphone-cord leash until he breaks away for a water fight and a treehouse. The score was performed by the Budapest Art Symphony Orchestra and supervised remotely from Los Angeles through the Los Angeles College of Music. It is unabashedly classical animation scoring — pizzicato for the strutting phone, woodwind comedy, a swelling brass theme when the kid finally runs — and it demonstrates something the concert pieces do not: that he can hit picture, frame by frame, with an orchestra he is directing from six thousand miles away.

A busy year on the shorts circuit

Most of Liu’s screen work so far lives in short film, which is where composers of his generation build a reel. Before Sunrise, directed by Yixing Zhong and carrying Liu’s original score, screened at the LA Shorts International Film Festival — one of the few short-film festivals whose awards qualify a film for Academy Award consideration — during its 2026 edition. Stay/Go, directed by Jimmy Zhu, was selected for a NewFilmmakers Los Angeles monthly festival. He also scored The 8th Actor for director Kasper Qiu and The Line Between Us for director Jiang Yijian.

The awards are worth naming precisely, because the short-film ecosystem is thick with competitions that sound grander than they are. Liu’s score for Poems of Forgotten Love won Best Score at the Los Angeles Film Awards in January 2026; The Line Between Us took an Honorable Mention for Best Original Score at the Independent Shorts Awards in February 2026. Both are independent, rolling competitions rather than major industry awards. His music for Poems of Forgotten Love was separately entered for consideration for the David Raksin Award for Emerging Talent at the 7th Annual SCL Awards — a submission, not a win. His piano suite Parallel Hometown took First Prize at the XVIII Golden Key International Piano Composition Competition and was performed in Vienna. And where his materials cite the Cannes Short Film Corner, that is Cannes’ professional marketplace for short films, not a place in the festival’s Official Selection.

Stacked honestly, it is still a real trajectory: an active festival year, a professional orchestra premiere he conducted himself, and a European scoring session on his ledger before 30. He is a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association of Composers, USA, the Society of Composers and Lyricists, Grammy U, the Chinese Musicians Association and China’s Electronic Music Association.

Why he is making this argument now

Liu has been developing Experiential Composition as a personal method for years. What has changed, by his own account, is the context. In his written statement to The LA Note, he describes the philosophy as having become “especially meaningful to me as technology and AI continue to reshape the creative industries” — an emphasis on drawing from genuine human experience and inner emotional connection as the foundation of artistic creation.

He does not raise AI in the Parallel Voices interview at all; the philosophy stands on its own there, as a response to conservatory training rather than to software. But the connection he is drawing is not hard to follow. A generative model is very good at producing the thing Liu spent years learning to distrust: music that is technically defensible, stylistically fluent and arrived at without anyone feeling anything. If that is now cheap and instant, then the part of the job that stays scarce is the part he has been insisting on — a person who has been somewhere, felt something specific, and can tell when the notes on the page match it. A composer who writes by formula is competing with the formula. A composer whose test is physical is not.

Whether that holds as a career strategy is a question the next few years will answer for a lot of working composers, not just this one. Other screen composers are arriving at adjacent answers from different directions — see George Voukanos trading the orchestra for synthesizers on Terra Olympia, or Toddy Tang’s 200 revisions in search of a single honest vocal. What is clear is that Liu has committed to a position, given it a name, and put enough work behind it to be held to it.

“You can explain 100 reasons,” he says, “but your body doesn’t lie.” It is a hard standard to fake, which is presumably the point.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Yuxuan Liu?

Yuxuan Liu, who also works under the name Keene Leo, is a screen and concert composer based in Los Angeles. Born in Guangyuan, China in 2000, he writes for film, television, video games, concert halls and interactive art. He studied composition and music engineering at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music before completing graduate study in Composing for Visual Media at the Los Angeles College of Music.

What is “Experiential Composition”?

Experiential Composition is the name Yuxuan Liu gives to his own working method. Rather than beginning with a technical or theoretical framework, he enters the emotional landscape of a project first and writes from inside the narrative rather than applying music to it from the outside. His test for whether a cue is working is physical rather than analytical: if the music does not trigger a genuine sensory response in him as he writes it, he treats that as a signal the idea is not ready.

What does Yuxuan Liu mean by “your body won’t lie”?

It is his shorthand for trusting bodily response over intellectual justification. As he puts it in a Mandarin-language interview on the channel Parallel Voices, “You can explain 100 reasons, but your body doesn’t lie.” The argument is that a composer can always construct a rational defence of a passage, but cannot fake the involuntary physical reaction that genuinely affecting music produces — so that reaction, not the theory, is the reliable measure.

What has Yuxuan Liu composed?

His screen credits include original scores for the short films Poems of Forgotten Love, The Line Between Us (dir. Jiang Yijian), The 8th Actor (dir. Kasper Qiu), Stay/Go (dir. Jimmy Zhu) and Before Sunrise. His concert works include the string quintet Zagler, the orchestral piece Sigh of Spring’s Farewell and the piano suite Parallel Hometown. He has also written for interactive art, including The Light and Shadows on the Kora Path, selected for the 2025 Aranya Theater Festival in China.

Has Yuxuan Liu conducted his own work with a professional orchestra?

Yes. He composed and conducted Sigh of Spring’s Farewell with the Manila Symphony Orchestra at the Aliw Theater in Manila on June 28, 2025, as part of the orchestra’s Season 99 concert series programme “A Night in Hollywood.” He also conducted the world premiere of his string quintet Zagler in Franklin Hills, Los Angeles, on August 16, 2025.

What awards has Yuxuan Liu received?

His score for Poems of Forgotten Love won Best Score at the Los Angeles Film Awards in January 2026, and his score for The Line Between Us received an Honorable Mention for Best Original Score at the Independent Shorts Awards in February 2026. His piano suite Parallel Hometown took First Prize at the XVIII Golden Key International Piano Composition Competition. These are independent competitions rather than major industry awards. His music for Poems of Forgotten Love was also entered for consideration for the David Raksin Award for Emerging Talent at the 7th Annual SCL Awards.

Yuxuan Liu’s catalogue, project list and contact details are at yuxuanliumusic.com. He posts scoring sessions, premieres and festival news on Instagram at @yuxuanliumusic and publishes work on YouTube.