I talked about my recent exercise trend here. But I think I need to focus on my sleep a bit more, as in recent years, due to various reasons, I didn’t get the necessary sleep and that is taking a toll on my health.
Fortunately both my last job and my current job are less demanding, and less stressful. But I am getting older too 🙁
Recently I started to listen to music during sleep. That alone may not be the best solution for “not being able to fall into asleep”. But I am fine tune it, as well as adjusting so that I don’t listen to my iPod Nano (I talked about it here and here), or a new MP3 player I bought the whole time.
Also, back to exercise, I think in addition to swim or walking, I am going to focus a bit more on meditation, such as breath on Apple Watch or Yoga via YT (see my YT Yoga playlist).
PS:
I got to see my uncle (my mom’s little big brother, who is 89 years old) this summer. He commented on the sleep problem we have. He said, not exact words, but why we are worrying about things in the night? His point was we probably had too much stress from our day job (which is probably true). Back to the time when he was young, he probably doesn’t have the material things we have now, but he is much happier. Probably one reason he lives to 89 🙂
(Update 10-17-2025) I just came across this at FB “What is Success? Success is being able to go to bed each night with your Mind at Peace.”
PS 2:
To my fellow HS students’ parents especially parents of student athletes: now we have this AI thing – let AI do the work and let our kids and all of us have some more sleep 😴 (not my words, coach and my uncle’s words – they are wiser than me. Okay I added this AI thing for dramatic effect [捂脸]). Btw, tonight is the blue and white night at #LHWHS and if you have time (no impacting on your or your kids sleep schedule): the girls powder puff flag football game is fun to watch. #homecoming #powderPuff
I did one thing similar: something I mostly figured out my own, with some inputs from friend(s). I listened to Cantonese music (slow music, more like lullabies). Do you want to guess which musicians (singers) I listened to most often? Btw, I mostly use my 13-year-old iPod Nano (as shown here). Because it doesn’t have the fancy stuff on my iPhone and won’t pull me into the blackhole of “doom scrolling”.
I think in theory at least, a podcast or a book would do the similar trick. I mostly just listened to one song non-stop (loop) – a side benefit is it saves the battery of iPod Nano.
Music playlist is quite common nowadays. For me personally I was a bit late to the party. I did use playlist on my iPhone Apple Music app, and on my YT: both desktop and iPhone. But recently since I started to participate the group exercise class at the J, I realized playlist and music in general is a big deal. I believe the Yoga teachers at the J has a playlist too.
An example or case study
清新女声何璟昕：薄荷糖般的味道甜入我心 (QQ Music QQ音乐 ) Note: you will likely need to log in to see the content. For me I use my WeChat login (SSO) for many China-based website/apps. You can read more about Ayen 何璟昕 here
I created a few Playlists for Ayen 何璟昕 on YT and YT Music – this one specially for original songs – Ayen阿昕原创+新歌. Note I have the premium subscription for YT and it allows me to listen to the YT Music in the background, in addition to some other features such as skipping ads in a video.
She did quite a bit of 翻唱 (cover, or acoustic cover) in last few years. I like them all. Some of songs are new to me because I left mainland China in summer/fall 1997. Below a “mixes” of 翻唱 cover songs I listened on 04-08-2025 early morning – “Mixes are playlists YouTube makes for you” per YT. I think the link above may expire after certain time. Btw, I think “mixes” or the YT generated list is a good way to explore what’s out there, because YT will recommend new songs. So in other words, this kind of playlist has some discovery functions. Update 04-20-2025 Btw, I realized this is a dynamic list. Update 04-28-2025: I started to appreciate the computers (and the AI) may have an edge or advantage to create playlist, based on the listening history. The recommendation algorithm may be similar to the social media posts suggestion.
【Mr. 森林】Acoustic guitar cover | Ayen 何璟昕 (Oct 16, 2020, this is YT upload date, same below) Hint: this one has about one minute of funny behind the scenes 花絮/彩蛋 videos in the end – made me realize that it’s not easy to learn a new song and so on. Obviously, it depends on the song itself too. Also, I think many people would appreciate some of the light hearted carefree nature in the behind the scenes 花絮/彩蛋 too.
Some of my older readers may know I have an iPod Nano 7th generation. Right now I just sync all my iTunes songs that I like from Mac to the iPod. Thinking creating playlist next (from Mac, then sync to the iPod Nano).
Usage of playlist
I think there are at least two use cases for me. One is the background music during work. Another one is background music for sleep. I used to listen to the radio (more specifically NPR or over the night it’s more likely BBC World News), but listening to news has its downside, because sometimes the news can be depressing, and other times news would keep me awake. I prefer some calming music over news. A secondary factor is using iPod nano as radio drains battery more quickly.
More on YT Playlist
I found playlist is integrated with YouTube Studio (I create YT video there too). I have 203 playlists: I think I need to clean up some. Also the link above is only available to me (because I am the owner of my YT Studio account).
Yes, people can make money curating music playlists. Platforms like Playlist Push and others offer curators payment for reviewing music and maintaining active playlists. Pay varies, with some curators earning $1.50 to $15 per song reviewed, depending on their playlist’s listenership.
Btw, I just noticed two of my YT Music playlists have more than 1,000 views.
(Original March 18, 2025) 她的音乐是治愈的 her music is curing – Yours Truly. This is one example: her original Cantonese song Moonlight – 何璟昕 Ayen《月光 Moonlight 》官方高畫質 Official HD MV, note the link is YouTube 油管. Here is Bilibili link: standaloneor official, good sound quality; live performance video. I encourage you buy her music from either Apple Music (iTunes store) or her Taobao store. Musicians need to eat and have other daily needs: we don’t want to be free loaders. Or if I can quote one of my favorite people in the world: if you are lucky, please make sure someone else in the world is lucky too. This person is Warren Buffett. Back to topic.
Lyrics for the song Moonlight 月光 can be seen here at jspinyin.net (this one has Pin’yin annotation) or 酷歌词 kugeci.com (this one has links to a singer’s other popular songs).
Another comment on YT: “When the world is moving to fast just listen to Ayen, and everything will be alright.” –Daniel Vache (very well said – yours truly)
She actually sing in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Her Chinese name is 何璟昕 or He Jing’xin in Pin’yin. In Cantonese, 阿昕 sounds a bit like 阿音 or Ayen in English. Both her parents are teachers when she grew up. In fact I saw her mom on this YT video (lovely mom/daughter pair, to say the least).
Here is her wikipedia 何璟昕 (Chinese) Ayen Ho (English). Full Disclosure: I made some contributions to her Wiki pages recently. It’s a somewhat fun experience for someone who likes to edit, write and knows basics of html.
Some social media and music platforms for Ayen 何璟昕
This is probably one of the most popular video platforms in China. I think Douyin is similar: the main difference is Douyin only has short videos. Note you will need to log into the website in order to have full experience with website or app. She did quite a few live show in 2020 on Bilibili, here is one – Ayen何璟昕 x bilibili直播 (纯享剪辑版) [2020.04.08] You may need to register at the website in order to watch, I did, mostly via my gmail and WeChat. Their system is pretty rigorous, I would say, at this time I still cannot upload video there. I think they need to verify my ID or something.
Douyin 抖音
(Update 05-24-2025) Now I realized Douyin 抖音 is much bigger compared to Bilibli 哔哩哔哩, as I said in my other blog post. Here is her Douyin: I think ByteDance (Douyin and TikTok parent co) longer video platform inside China is 西瓜视频。
In order to have full experience with Douyin, one will need to install the mobile app. Note the app is only available inside China. So for instance, if I want the app, I need to to try a different geolocation (China instead of the USA).
One can still watch videos without creating an account. To do it, one needs to pass a captcha – basically slide a shape.
She has quite a few songs on her Weibo, but this one (not music, about how to stay away from online fraud) caught my attention today – 我这么谨慎的人，居然也差点被骗20万… (personally I felt bad for her, but it seems like just something happens quite often nowadays, and I will talk about it sometime in the near future).
She is on WeChat (Wei Xing) and Red Note (Xiao Hong Shu) too – you should be able to search her name 何璟昕 and find her there.
I noticed her subscriber steadily increased from 47.9 k (03-11-25?) to 49.5 k today 05-01-25. It appears her YT channel is gaining about 1k subscribers per month. At this rate I am fairly confident that her channel will have 50k subscribers by the end of this month (I think 50.5 k subscriber count is within reach at 05/31/25). I hope my small contributions on the Wikipedia 何璟昕 (Chinese) Ayen Ho (English) helped 🙂
Some of her original work(compose, lyrics or both)
何璟昕 Ayen【向光性 Phototropism】原創音樂 官方高畫質 Official HD MV: she actually wrote this song when she was about 17 (year 2011) – 独立音乐人何璟昕：向光飞舞的风筝. She made an album with the same tile in year 2016: the album actually has more than 3 songs as shown in this YT playlist. I will update if/when I find the complete playlist.
If you like her music, you can purchase in a few ways. Apple Music store (iTunes Store, search “Ayen何璟昕“) and Taobao 淘宝网。Below is how you would find her music on iTunes store.
Apple iTunes Store (Note: this is available on iPhone as well)
On Taobao, you would search Ayen的店：she sells both her music and her Donna brand guitar there. Last but not least, she sells 吉他谱 Guitar Music online.
Some of her recent workand other songs I like
放手以后 via YT (网易云音乐, 2024) – lyrics available at boomplay; Author/Composer: Carlos’ Instagram. Also a short chip (similar to YT Shorts) on Douyin. Note for Douyin: I don’t have account with them for now – it still allows me to watch the video, if I click “dismiss” when it prompts me to put in my mobile phone or password, and turn on the volume.
I started listened to her a lot in last week or so, partially because we had 3 days power outage, and I didn’t have much else to do. I know you can argue I can listen to someone else’s music too 🙂 If my memory is correct, this time around I came across this new song 【哪吒2】片尾曲《在故事的最終》粵語版｜港風填詞翻唱｜唱哭每個成長的孩子 Acoustic cover｜Ayen何璟昕. Since then it’s been a black hole 🙂
New song《時間不等你》Time doesn’t wait for you: I listened to her new song 时间不等你 (2024) #粤语歌 many times. I really liked the music, the lyrics and Ayen’s singing.
作詞：陳鈺海 作曲：石羽函 編曲：梁雨森 (the link goes to Douyin, note you can still visit Douyin even without an account, you just need to complete the Captcha and also dismiss the dialog about phone number). Below is quoted from his Douyin profile. 棉花佬就是梁雨森🎸在此！职业吉他手，作曲/编曲 “棉花乐队”成立二年啦～ 以棉花乐队的形式致敬BEYOND乐队～ 不教学，不卖谱～
YT: 【粵語】想見你想見你想見你｜火土填詞 x AYAN何璟昕｜想見你劇集主題曲 (Update 04-02-2025) I liked this song very much. There are a few variations (Mandarin, Cantonese as well as different lyrics). I came across it at QQ Music first and noticed Ayen sang a few variations there. Then I did search on google and WeChat and noticed other versions, as well as the TV series that featured this song.
I don’t know about you, but to me this song reminds me 粤语更接近文言文.
Live Performance
何璟昕碩士作曲專場音樂會 (2021). Note she created all the below songs (compose and lyrics) over the years. She graduated in Dec 2021.
Also note, she pretty much managed all her creative activities by herself, this is from composing, lyrics, graphic design, photography, videography, editing, sound, and managing her social media and music platforms. She explained it here – 一個人就是一個團隊？/揭秘：我平時是如何一個人製作視頻的！
Slightly older videos (I believe that’s when Ayen created and uploaded videos to the Internet). Between 2014 and 2017, she debuted or sang quite a few Cantonese, Mandarin and English songs, mainly using her own acoustic guitar or ukulele as accompanying instruments and posted some of the videos on Sohu.com, and more specialized website such as yueqixuexi.com too. Some of the songs are also available on QQ Music (QQ 音乐）too.
(She took the video in Summer 2014, uploaded it to YT on Jan 30, 2020) 梁靜茹 – 暖暖 cover（吉他 + ukulele ）| Ayen 何璟昕 || On YT, if you want to look at her old videos, you can go to her channel, click on videos, and then click “Oldest”. This approach works across the YT too.
(Update 04-3-2025) I just created a YT playlist Ayen何璟昕-early: I believe those are songs/MVs she made between 2014 and 2019.
From the Sohu.com videos, the playlist above, to her more recent videos/songs such as 时间不等你, we can see her growth in many aspects. But I think she kept her 温柔女生 style, for the most part, through the years. That’s probably one reason I liked her singing.
She talked about her video creation and how she pursued her music career from a hobby in middle school. She actually made two videos because she wanted to keep her video under certain length. Below are two videos.
Some fun videos: having a sense of humor (despite all kinds of obstacles in life) is important. I created a playlist in which she has some fun elements in the music videos.
翻唱 (cover, or acoustic cover) and Playlists
Since this is getting a bit long, I moved the content here to another post here – Playlist.
One thing I may add is: in many ways 翻唱, or cover, or acoustic cover, is creative and sometimes hard work. For example, in this video, 謝安琪【喜帖街】Kay Tse 鋼琴+吉他彈唱 這是一首關於懷舊的粵語歌 | cover by Ayen 何璟昕, she rented the 1980s style house (惠州棠梨和光民宿), as well as some other interesting and fun settings. Here is another one 【Mr. 森林】Acoustic guitar cover | Ayen 何璟昕: if you watch towards the end, you will notice the work put behind it.
Last but not least, music industry is intensely competitive (I talked a bit here). I didn’t expand or elaborate, but in short, the top dogs such as Taylor Swift of the USA and the G.E.M Gloria Deng Zhiqi of HK/China makes most of the dough in the industry, via steaming, live performance, merchandise and products endorsement (ads). That’s all good, but we should not forget about musicians who are less famous. That’s why personally I support all my kids music teachers (as much as practical) and in this case, we should support Ayen 何璟昕 too.
If you are interested learning guitar (take guitar lesson from her), or collaborate on music creation (music composition, lyrics etc.), you may reach out to her “如果你想讓我為你製作音樂（編曲/作詞/作曲都可以），或者想找我學習吉他音樂課程”
(Picture above Hilary Hahn, who plays the violin for Suzuki book 1; the piano was played by Natalie Chen)
(Update 12-14-2023) I realized my daughter’s violin teacher also knows how best to keep the kids engaged and interested. Couple things: 1) The practice sheet, he has a worksheet which looks like a printed out Excel spreadsheet and kids feel accomplishment after completing each task. He also plans to do a pizza party for the “most continuously practice” for celebrations. 2) Along similar lines, I saw during group class, yesterday it was probably holiday themed, he gave out candies for small quiz or games, or challenges.
(Original) My younger one started the Suzuki violin lesson recently. I heard about the Suzuki violin lesson a long time ago (more than 10 years ago), when my older one was little. But we didn’t pick violin lessons for her. Like many Chinese parents, we picked piano lessons. We started piano lessons for our younger one a few years ago as well, and kept it through the pandemic (for the most part, the main exception is the shutdown period between March 2020 and May 2020).
Choose the Right Teacher
I picked the violin teacher after doing some research. Mainly following friends and my own gut feeling. Now looking back I feel I am a bit lucky: I think this Suzuki method is probably the way to go here. Note this is the 1st Suzuki violin book – Suzuki Violin School, Vol 1: Violin Part. The book no longer has an attached CD, I believe. So I went to the Apple iTunes store to get the music and searching “Suzuki violin book 1” seems to bring me the wrong music for the book. It brings up Takako Nishizaki’s Suzuki Evergreens and you bet I bought it. It took me to a while to find out the one album matching the book (again it should look something like the photo at the top).
Our younger daughter recently passed the twinkle test. It’s the first level of the test, I would not discount it though. The teacher said the average time to pass it is a bit over one year (I should add the average kid’s age to start violin lesson is probably much younger than our 9 year old too). The start age for kids to learn something is interesting. I think in general, it gets easier for a kid to learn something when he/she gets older, another good example is swimming. But at the same time, if we start something on a kid too late, most likely he/she will do okay but not able to complete in today’s competitive world – that’s the dilemma. I know some kids who have potential to play soccer in college or in the national team down the road, and they worked real hard from a very young age, and the parents are shuttling them to practice/games like a full time job. Similar for mind sports such as Chess. So in other words, we should not just looked at how well a kid did on something, we also should look at how many miles the parent put on her car, or his frequent flyer miles 🙂
Back to the topic: the violin lesson. As I was the parent who drove her to class, as well as help her practice in the early days. I do the bow for her as she was not ready to use the bow yet (the teacher doesn’t want her to build bad habit). She is on her 2nd and 3rd song now. The music (violin) thing seems hard to me for two reasons:
The master of the music, reading notes etc.
The coordination and movement of two hands, in the case of violin, one hand (fingers) need to move and push down the strings, while the other one does the bow. The “bow” part is actually hard, as it was not natural, as I saw from one YouTube video a while ago. Took a while for Sophia to get familiar to it.
To overcome this, I think her violin teacher did a few things right.
He has a spreadsheet-like worksheet for the kid, this way the kid could mark every day’s practice. Talking about the organization.
Rigors with a sense of humor. I think most American-born kids or parents in America can sympathize, maybe I can extrapolate it to the world too, basically, nobody would like to be criticized. In the piano teachers/kids community, I heard horrendous stories such as the teacher would scold the parents if the kids didn’t do the work or practice.
Group lessons and encouragement to the kids to participate in an ensemble (namely, the SE and higher at CMS at Webster U). We just started the group lesson. I think this will be quite helpful as kids like to learn in a social environment too.
Use of computer and modern tech. I think the teacher is probably about 70 years old. He was previously a music teacher at Kirkwood and a violin teacher at CMS (Webster U). He does email communication, word doc, Zoom etc. very well – which is probably standout among his peers. He also encourages me to take video on iPhone for Sophia to learn at home, for music and posture, and hand (finger) gesture.
Violin Kids
In our school district the kids have the options to learn violin at 4th grade. I understand some other school districts offer that too. Our main motivation for Sophia is to have some confidence when the violin lesson starts this school year, and she may have a bit “1st mover advantage”. I know at least one other kid at her grade does violin too (already). Again this is mostly help our younger daughter to find her niche (or calling), something she can feel good about (after doing some work). We have absolutely no expectation for her to play professionally down the road. We respect all the professional musicians. But we know that’s not easy and it’s not for everyone. In fact, the step daughter of Sophia’s teacher is a pro, and she plays for SLSO. The teacher said she played 4 hours a day when she was young, and we saw her video when she was 8 and she looked already like a pro (being 8 years old).
Learning music in general (kids version)
We started piano lesson for our older daughter when she was in kindergarten (she was 5 and a half). She had a pretty rigorous teacher to start. After a while, things became harder for her and she kinda slacked off. And we also stepped back too as we don’t want to be berated by the teacher when our daughter didn’t do her work. Later we switch her to an easier piano teacher. She did other things such as SLCCSing (St. Louis Children’s Choirs), from 1st grade until 7th. This coming year we planned to have her take a break on choir. She started percussion 2 years ago when she was in the 6th grade (middle school), and we will continue her on that. She seems like music in general, as a hobby and a relaxation tool. She sings and occasionally plays ukuleles at home, and sometimes plays piano too now that she doesn’t have piano lessons (more or more willingly compared to the days she has the piano lessons). She doesn’t have plan to major in music so far, but may consider it as a minor in college. She is not talented in piano as some other Chinese kids. She only won one medal from piano (the sonatina thing when she was 6 or 7, at the Lindenwood U).
For our younger daughter we were more laid back, also due to the pandemic, we started her on piano with the “nicer” teacher. And she did the chorus at her school in last school year. And in this April we started her on violin. We hope she can continue this path (a bit like her big sister does percussion for now).
Again like many parents here, we like our kids to learn music (reading notes etc.) as well as mastering one instrument. I understand for percussion, this is a bit hard to identify a particular instrument, marimba is a common one, but drums are also common.
Also, last but not least, a while ago I heard playing piano (maybe easier to start than violin for older people), could have potential benefit of prevent dementia, so that’s something I need to get more serious about.
PS: again please note I am not doing any victory lap here. I am just sharing what I know (and don’t know). And I welcome any feedback, comments or questions.
