EricXi Xin Liang
Pianist, and transcriber of operas and symphonies for solo piano. Also a principal software engineer.
Featured recordingSorabji — Le Jardin Parfumé22:35The Reductions
Solo-piano reductions of the operas and symphonies that resist the piano most: Strauss, Puccini, Shostakovich. They are written to be played, not studied on paper, and published free under CC BY-SA.
Near one-to-one. Ten fingers, minimal loss. 441 pages engraved so far, every one played through before publication.
Notices
“It's good to be able to hear Sorabji in a much more accurate realization than what we're accustomed to.”
“What an extraordinary achievement… I think everything works beautifully.”
By the numbers
Across 99 recordings on @Musicforever60, about 21 hours of music.
26 published reductions across 8 composers, counted from the scores themselves.
Including 204k for one five-minute movement, “VII. Cadenza I” from the four-hour Opus Clavicembalisticum.
D · The register changes here
The other hand.
Principal software engineer. The same method runs both lines: find the root cause, respect the hard constraint, lose as little as possible.
Cyclops watermarking
PatentedPirated live streams need to be traced back to the account that leaked them.
The mark must survive re-encoding, cropping and screen capture while staying invisible to viewers.
Led the R&D of a watermarking algorithm combining signal processing, computer vision and ML decoding, and built most of the low-latency streaming backend around it.
Industry-leading decode robustness. Infrastructure cost cut by about 40% and compute by about 90% while usage tripled.
AI-integrated media platform
A major sports broadcaster needed AI built into its production workflow.
Four months to delivery, on infrastructure that had to be auditable and finely permissioned.
Sole architect of 450+ Terraform-managed AWS resources, a relationship-based permission system and a GPU-bound ML image pipeline.
Delivered on time and now part of the client's daily workflow.
Fine-grained permission system
Enterprise clients need access rules finer than roles: per entity, per scope, and across accounts.
Roles, groups, inheritance and single sign-on all have to compose, and permission checks still have to be fast.
An IAM-like, relationship-based model on OpenFGA and DynamoDB with policy-based roles, scope inheritance, group membership and cross-account sharing.
One permission layer behind every part of the platform, including SSO.
Two hands, one system
Music on the treble line, engineering on the bass. The two run in parallel and are read as one.
- 2008 · MusicFirst lessonsAge eight, with a teacher who lived next door.
- 2013 · MusicARCT diploma at 13The Royal Conservatory's highest credential.
- 2014 · MusicRachmaninoff Concerto No. 1Vancouver Orpheum, with VAMSO.
- 2015 · MusicCanadian Music Competition, First PrizeAnd Prokofiev's Concerto No. 2 at the Orpheum.
- 2016 · MusicOSM Competition and Seattle InternationalTop prize at the OSM; first prize in Seattle.
- 2017 · EngineeringUniversity of WaterlooComputer Science, Statistics minor; six internships.
- 2019 · MusicBrahms Concerto No. 2With orchestra@
uwaterloo; first prize at the Concerto and Aria Competition. - 2020 · MusicUncharted repertoireMedtner, Feinberg, Roslavets, Ives, Szymanowski. The channel begins.
- 2021 · MusicSorabjiIn the Hothouse, Le Jardin Parfumé, Djâmî and Gulistān in one year.
- 2022 · MusicOpus ClavicembalisticumFour hours, recorded movement by movement.
- 2022 · EngineeringAmazon Web ServicesSoftware Development Engineer, Vancouver.
- 2024 · MusicThe first opera reductionsMadama Butterfly and La bohème, Act I.
- 2024 · EngineeringRedflag AISenior within eight months; led R&D on the patented Cyclops watermark.
- 2025 · MusicThe reductionsStrauss, Bruckner, Shostakovich: most of the catalogue is written from here on.
- 2025 · EngineeringOptikkaPrincipal Engineer.
- 2026 · MusicHamelin and HoughHamelin on the Sorabji recordings; Hough on the opera reductions.