I taught myself guitar in high school and generally enjoyed making up my own stuff as opposed to playing existing songs -- which, in hindsight, led to some "cool for an amateur" results but I would have really benefitted from a structured curriculum and/or expert guidance. (It's no coincidence the I've come much further in math/software -- I followed a structured curriculum for math and intro coding and have gotten a lot of expert guidance from Jason Roberts while building out the quantitative software behind Math Academy.)

Anyway, things started to get interesting once I started recording many layers with a looper and arranging & adding effects in Audacity, and during college I started experimenting with music production in LMMS. This initially involved cutting up, stitching together, and overlaying a variety of interesting-sounding samples (sourced from looperman.com) to form a background, and then creating a melody from scratch using guitar or violin/cello, sometimes throwing in piano for bridges or general support. I also made a few remixes (this is the one I'm most proud of).

Midway through college I made the transition to composing everything from scratch. I became interested in film scoring and created an orchestral album fully from scratch, and then after that I created some more mainstream pieces including a melodic EDM piece and a beat.

While sorting my life out at the end of college (2018), I realized that although I really enjoyed making music, I enjoyed math more, was better at it, and it was more marketable. So I ended up dropping music production and leaning fully into math instead. Years later, while consolidating my personal archives, I re-discovered a bunch of old songs and uploaded them to YouTube for safekeeping.

Nowadays, I still enjoy listening to music and I've started going to a bunch of concerts, but I don't play much anymore. (I pick up the guitar once in a while to jam around a bit, but that's about it.)

Below are all the musical pieces that I feel are interesting enough to share, organized into several playlists.

I played live a couple times. It was fun. I don't have much footage, but "pics or it didn't happen," so here's the proof. (Photo credit: Jonathan Baker; video credit: my dad)