Reacting to the K: An Interview with Emma Chang
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from photographs provided by Emma Chang; Study for “Music”, 1894, by Francis Augustus Lathrop (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum); the autographed partiture of the Polonaise Op. 53 in A flat major for piano, 1842, by Frédéric Chopin (Heineman Music Collection [Unbound], Pierpont Morgan Library Dept. of Music Manuscripts and Books, Wikimedia Commons).
ReacttotheK is a popular YouTube channel best known for its “Classical & Jazz Musicians React” series, in which classical and jazz musicians react to K-pop songs and share their musical analyses and opinions. Currently at 841K subscribers, the channel has grown into a vibrant community that bridges musicians, fans, industry professionals, and artists. For Issue 002, MENT sat down with channel founder Emma Chang (Umu) to talk about her musical background, the origins of ReacttotheK, and K-pop itself—its mixed-genre hybridity, its occasional dives into noise and dissonance, and its embrace of bold new sounds.
Can you describe your music background and training? What has your journey looked like?
I’d say music has always been a very large part of my life. I know everyone says that, but from the second I was born, I’ve been surrounded by music. My parents are musicians—neither of them are professional, but my mom plays piano, and my dad plays guitar. They would sing me to sleep every night. Then, in elementary school, I learned how to play violin before signing up to join a children’s choir.
Not long after, I fell in love with the French horn. I ended up majoring in French Horn performance at the Eastman School of Music (ESM), and that was where I learned music theory, an experience that would eventually change the rest of my life. Eastman is very particular about music theory. We had separate classes focusing on different aspects of it, which meant we had extra opportunities to learn more deeply about music through ear training, score analysis, and dictation.
With this music theory education, my perspective on music changed entirely. It’s what led me to start a YouTube channel.
How did your music background and training inform the way you listened to K-pop specifically?
I became a fan of K-pop before my music knowledge blossomed. A friend sat me down in the summer of 2015 and showed me BTS’ “Dope” and VIXX’s “Voodoo Doll,” along with some of the variety show content like VIXX’s MTV Diary and the Bangtan Bomb YouTube series. I remember thinking, wow, not only are these people amazing dancers, amazing singers, and great rappers, but, oh, my goodness, they’re hilarious. From there, I couldn’t stop myself from going down the rabbit hole of the K-pop world.
After a year of rigorous music theory college classes, I started to notice the details of what made K-pop so special. Music school had taught me to listen closely to the development of a motif in an orchestral piece, so I started listening to pop in the same way. For instance, in the same way we were trained to hone in on a particular instrument in a 100-person orchestra, I would listen to each instrumental layer of a K-pop song.
As a result, my listening was flipped 180 degrees because I began listening to pop music from an entirely different perspective. I found I didn’t like the same things that I used to like; my taste changed completely. I started craving different styles and sounds than I had before.
You’ve brought this musical perspective to your reaction channel. Could you describe the motivations for creating the channel? What do you hope to accomplish? Who do you want to reach?
Back in 2015, K-pop hadn’t yet gone completely mainstream on the global scene, and there were still stereotypes swimming around in my head about K-pop fans. I knew that we were few in number and heavily judged by society. When I finally found my small crew of K-pop fans in high school, we were at the end of our senior year and moving to places all over the continent. We decided, you know what, we see that other people upload reactions—why don’t we do a John and Hank Green Vlogbrothers-style channel and post our reactions to songs so we can see each other’s responses? That’s how we decided to stay in touch and stay connected in the fandom. So, that’s how my Youtube channel initially started: as a way to stay in contact with friends and hopefully entertain anyone else who came across our videos.
Then, when I began attending ESM, I was afraid there wasn’t going to be anyone else who liked K-pop. But I already had this Youtube channel, and I thought, well, I can use the fact that I’m attending a music conservatory to my advantage. I don’t see anyone else doing “classical musicians react to K-pop” online right now. I can just sit whoever’s willing to be on camera down and see if I can convert them into a K-pop fan. Our most popular series, “Classical Musicians React”, started that way: just as a hobby. I would meet with a small group of classmates who volunteered their time once a month, and I’d show them a new song that I liked. My goal wasn’t to reach anyone in particular with our reactions. When our first video blew up, we were all stunned.
You’ve had the channel for many years. Looking back, have your motivations evolved? What do you want to do with the channel now, and what has changed? Is there anything that has surprised you? New insights that have emerged?
When I first began, my goal was to convert other musicians, my classmates, into K-pop fans—to create my own small community within the larger ESM musician community. When the channel started getting extremely popular, though, my motivations absolutely developed and changed.
I wanted, for instance, to get rid of the “classical musicians are all stuck up and boring” stereotype. We were getting comments in the early days saying that classical musicians were so stuck up or “music students? You’ll all be flipping burgers for the rest of your lives”—those kinds of comments. But slowly, more and more people were like, oh, I’m surprised. Classical musicians are more open minded than we thought. Watching them talk and break down a song can be fun.
Around that point, I realized that we had been using all these musical terms that our audience was not familiar with. Our viewers had started looking things up on their own—or contacting us directly on social media, asking us to explain particular terminology. Other viewers even felt motivated to learn an instrument, or music theory, so that they could hear the songs from a similar perspective to ours. That then became my goal: to not only entertain our viewers but to educate them.
But one thing I never saw coming was our reactions reaching K-pop artists, songwriters, and producers themselves. Never in a million years did I expect that. Over the past couple of years, I have met with various labels and K-pop industry workers, and I learned that some really do take our reactions as legitimate feedback—even if our reactions have more constructive criticism than praise! Sometimes I get a DM saying, thank you for that feedback. We really appreciate your honesty. Or, dang, I wish we knew what you wanted the chords to sound like for this song before we published it because we would have made those changes.
When I went to Korea in 2023, actually, I met up with a Korean music journalist who said that from his perspective, our channel is for the music industry experts, rather than just the fans. I had never thought of my content through that lens before. I guess it’s because even with the genre differences between pop and classical, and the language barriers between us, we still listen to and understand music in the same way.
Of course, labels and producers understand that we are a very small and niche opinion amongst millions and millions of people, but it’s still absolutely crazy that they consume our content earnestly.
Your channel is clearly useful and interesting to both fan communities and music professionals. On that note, what strategies do you use on your channel to make one community legible to the other?
I’m not sure if I’m always successful in doing this, but I try to make content that is fun to watch for fans, where songs are explained in enough detail but not to the extent that it becomes overly confusing. I’m also trying to give a platform to over 14 different musicians and their honest opinions on music.
I often ask our musicians to play their instruments as they analyze a song. I also make sure to hire editors who know an adequate amount of music theory to help explain certain terms to the audience. Or, I will personally help define and explain what the reactors are saying during the filming process.
We have produced a few music theory explanation videos as well. We made these videos so fans have the option to dive into music theory after watching our reaction content. Actually, some songwriters and producers have enjoyed these theory videos too; they’ve messaged me saying, “So that’s the word to use for the chord I wrote there!”
More recently, I’ve enjoyed releasing jazz and classical versions of K-pop songs. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been releasing drastically altered pop songs remade into jazz arrangements, i.e. with jazz instrumentation, chords, and form. It’s been hit and miss, I would say, but mostly hit.
When it comes to introducing classical musicians to K-pop, I try to recruit at least some reactors who don’t know what K-pop is, and then watch them learn to love it. They tend to repost the video to their stories, and then their friends learn about it, and from there, it spreads by word of mouth. I remember one of the jazz saxophonists on our channel said that they had no idea K-pop was this complex or that it included so many different genres and jazz elements as well.
What does the process look like for producing a single video? What is the timeline and the labor like?
Step number one is always choosing the songs. I listen to hundreds of songs every week, and I choose which ones I think our crew will be most surprised by, most shocked by, or most inclined to like. I always have in mind the goal to entertain and educate, so I have to be very selective about what songs I choose to show to the musicians. What sounds and genres, for instance, are the current crew of reactors already biased toward? I figure they’ll have plenty of commentary on those—after all, it’s hard to entertain our viewers if the crew just sits there staring blankly and silently at the music video they’re watching. So, the songs we choose have to include specific musical elements about which the current crew will have an abundance of (mostly positive) things to say.
After that, I research the chosen songs and write a script. I used to spend hours doing research, going through interviews with the artists, fan comment sections, Reddit, etc. I’m not a fan of AI overall, but I will admit that ChatGPT helps make my job a little bit easier. What I do is copy and paste the lyrics of a song into ChatGPT to help me summarize their message and meaning. If I’m writing a script for an artist’s personal song, or if it’s a sensitive or complicated topic, I will personally dive into their interviews to pull information straight from them or from their fans. But if it’s a love song about a cute boy, then I use ChatGPT to summarize the lyrics. After the lyrics are summarized, I research the credits for the song. This is something that can take anywhere from an hour to many days. Websites like GENIUS, Spotify, or color-coded lyric videos on YouTube often list writing, producing, and lyric credits. But on rare occasions, when none of those sites have credits available, I have to go into detective mode on Instagram to find the producers writing about their own work.
On average, the process of writing a single intro script to a song can take five minutes to an hour. The next step in my video creating process is to schedule and film all eight to 14 reactors. Our current crew features seven different reacting pairs with whom I meet once a week. Each filming session is about an hour long (where we cover two to five different songs), totaling about seven hours of filming every week. On top of this work, we also have film and audio equipment maintenance.
Then, I transfer everything over to a hard drive or Google Drive for our contract editors. Since we film in 4K, this part of the video creating process can take egregiously long. It takes about five hours to go over, organize, and rename all the new files each week. There are probably easier ways to do it, but I’ve been doing this by trial and error ever since I first started, and this method is what I learned works best.
After those many hours, then comes the editing. Now, the time it takes to edit a ReacttotheK video depends on how complicated the reactions are. Did the reactors dive into a lot of complex music theory analysis? Were music terms and chord breakdowns thoroughly and audibly explored in the film session? Does the footage of all seven reacting pairs add up to be hours long, or is there a limited variety of commentary? How often do visual and audio edits appear and how complex are they? Overall, I’d say, per reaction, it takes between 10 to 50 hours to edit in total, not including the description I write that has a detailed timeline of the topics covered in the reaction.
After the final draft of a video is uploaded, I send it to volunteer friends, fans, or assistant editors to add English CCs. I took ASL growing up in high school, so for me, the accessibility of subtitles is very, very important for my content.
If we’re able to monetize the video after the English subtitles are added, I will send it to additional people to translate the video into different languages. But if it isn’t monetizable, we won’t have the budget to translate into those other languages. I know lately we’ve been getting a lot of requests to translate the videos into more languages, but sometimes we don’t have any money left to do it. I’m sorry!
The final step to releasing a ReacttotheK video is to promote it on all our social media channels. We promote through Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram and, occasionally, vertical shorts on Youtube.
There you have it: the singular process of making a ReacttotheK video! The process, depending on the circumstances, can take anywhere from weeks to months.
Turning to the music itself: as we know, K-pop is an incredibly hybridized genre that draws influences from Korean, Japanese, Black American, and many other global music styles. What, in your view, has been the role of the Western classical music tradition in this hybrid sound?
I think the inclusion of classical music in K-pop makes K-pop a fantastic gateway into traditional orchestral pieces. What initially turns people away from classical music tends to be 1) the length of each piece and 2) not being able to quite tell the sounds of the instruments apart from each other—getting bored with a wall of sound that seems to have no groove. There are also no lyrics to tell a story; classical music instead demands that you actively listen to the narrative of the instruments and melodies alone. But I think K-pop using classical instrumentation and sampling classical music shows that classical music also can have hooks, be groovy, and be as addictive and beautiful as synth or bands sound.
I’ll acknowledge here that a majority of classical musicians might think that classical music interpolation, quoting, and sampling in pop music is very cringe because of how much it oversimplifies the original piece. Very often, pop producers take something we’ve spent months listening to and analyzing just to be able to play well and then cut it down to only a few seconds. I understand that perspective those classical musicians have. But I’ve also come to appreciate the joining together of the two worlds.
For instance, sometimes when pop producers sample classical music, they take influence from the chord progressions of the classical piece. That tends to make the pop song a lot more colorful; it means that the chords have more depth to them in the way orchestra music does. It also means that the song has more instruments participating in building the color of the track. In these moments, I feel classical music adds a lot of sophistication to pop.
I also think [invoking classical music] echoes what K-pop does well in general: allowing the instrumental to speak for itself. After all, if you’re only singing in one or two languages, how do you get your message across to the people who are not fluent in those languages? You do it through emotional music production. K-pop, like classical music, carries a lot of those emotional techniques.
Speaking of the global market and the way K-pop adapts to its demands, I wanted to talk about the genre irreverence that defines a lot of K-pop music. I’m thinking here about NMIXX’s debut concept, as well as certain songs by aespa. There can be a lot of pushback and dislike around these genre-irreverent styles, but from a musical perspective, what do you think is the function of “genre mixing” in a single track? Why does K-pop keep doing it?
I think my opinion on genre mixing has changed over the years, especially as I’ve met more K-pop producers, A&Rs, and other industry figures.
They told me, for instance, about the labels’ perspective on the music. A lot of the [formal] musical decisions around a song boil down to entertainment. K-pop is a crossover of so many different art forms, and it needs to be interesting enough to support these different forms. [They also have in mind] shortening attention spans—they want to change things up; they don’t want to bore the audience.
The second concern I heard from industry professionals was the need to support the character of every artist in the group. If you have five members, that means you might have five different personalities and five different vocal timbres. You also have rappers mixed with vocalists, which means you’ll need a rap section; you’ll need a vocal section and, of course, K-pop often needs a dance section. Those demands become inspirations for stylistic changes. Basically, you’ve got to write the song to support different personalities and diverse performance skills.
Finally, there’s this sense of “let’s be innovative.” What hasn’t been done before? How can we make our sound recognizable but also new and fresh? How can we push boundaries? I interviewed Dem Jointz once, and he told me that whenever he writes music, the goal is always to “surprise.” He said it’s like walking into a forest: “I don’t see where I’m going, but I’m going; I’m taking turns left and right and finding out where we end up.” This forest for Dem Jointz is the desire for the unexpected. That’s what brings him joy and also what, for him, ultimately entertains.
As a related question, do you see any kind of genre-irreverent equivalent in classical music? I ask because this might situate K-pop’s hybridity not as singular or historically unique but as continuing traditions of hybridity that have existed in other musical forms or industries.
Music in the baroque and classical eras had to make sure, on a basic level, that the audience didn’t lose attention or fall asleep. To that end, there were contrasting sections written whenever a melody came to be repeated. For example, a classical piece will present a main theme. Then, when the theme repeats, there will be notes added between the already existing ones. These additions vary the material in different ways—tempo changes, instrumentation changes, and dynamic shifts. By using these techniques, composers made sure their material changed as it progressed.
This logic eventually emerges in pop song form as well. There is always a returning melody, or main theme (the hook) in pop, but as the song progresses, each verse introduces new lyrics. Then, of course, you also have a contrasting section in the bridge of the song.
When it comes to genre blending, early 20th-century composers started melding together jazz and classical forms. Take George Gershwin, for instance. He blended jazz with orchestral music in Rhapsody in Blue. He did it because he saw an ad in a newspaper claiming that he was releasing a jazz piece in five weeks’ time. He said, “what?” His friend responded, “well, yes, you should do it. You should. All you have to do is write a piano part, and I’ll do the arrangement for the orchestra.” The result pushed boundaries. The combined sound of jazz and classical also brought jazz music a level of fame and fortune that racism had previously denied it. Of course, there’s definitely an element here of taking someone’s culture and appropriating it—Gershwin was a white male classical musician after all. But it did familiarize the public with jazz sounds and forms: he made jazz sound popular.
Leonard Bernstein later merged jazz, Latin, and Broadway styles for plays like West Side Story. That effort was about breaking the existing musical norms. As musicians, you’re always interested in each other’s genres: how do you tell a different story by including this inspiration from other styles of music?
Now, we see this genre blending in many styles of music around the world. Since most of the K-pop industry prioritizes innovation, they often push the limit of pop song form via genre blending. There are groups now, like NMIXX, who dedicate their musical concept to featuring these unique forms and change-ups. Because of this innovative approach, there are classical musicians out there dedicating their doctoral theses to analyzing K-pop artist discographies.
Relatedly, the next question is about “noise” in K-pop. I’m thinking here about groups like Stray Kids but also about Dem Jointz’s production work, especially for groups like NCT. Where and how do you see noise or sonic dissonance functioning in K-pop tracks?
Right. So let’s say, a song is released, and the K-pop fans are saying, “oh, my god! It sounds like noise” or, “it sounds too noisy.” On our channel, we talk about why that is. First, that noisy effect can come from the dynamics or textures of the song. It can come from the presence of “unpitched” instruments, like percussive sound effects and foley noises, or “detuned” instruments within a song. [1] [2] These formal decisions are influenced by genre, as well as by the kind of emotion or message the artist wants to communicate.
If we’re thinking about Stray Kids, they’re a group whose main genres are EDM and hip-hop. Both genres come from music styles with a lot of rhythm: you can feel it; you can dance to it; you can spit fire to it. Stray Kids wants to release music that’s powerful to experience live—so they’re going to have loud bass; they’re going to have thick instrumentation, something that feels like surround sound when you’re hearing it live. You’re probably going to hear sirens because why not? It’s a part of their story, they’re “stray” kids, and the police are looking for them, or they’re being rushed off to the hospital—it’s all part of the storytelling process.
“Noise” lends itself to the edginess of a song as well. You want to have edginess and grit, not just in boy group concepts but in girl crush concepts as well. This means sharper choreography, badass facial expressions, cool outfits, and a noisier feeling overall. Only certain instrumentation and sounds can push that in the right way for the viewer.
Are there examples from classical music that also lean into sonic dissonance, or even noise, that can be helpful when we think about K-pop’s “noisiness”?
This is super exciting because I can talk here about the iconic An Alpine Symphony [composed by Richard Strauss], which is a classical piece that at one point attempts to paint the picture of a thunderstorm. [3] In that moment, Strauss heavily features trombones, French horns, all the brass sections trying to imitate the thunderstorm sound. He has the percussionists play giant bass drums to sound like thunder, cowbells to paint the picture of a herd of sheep, and even an instrument that imitates the sound of wind.
When it comes to dissonance and really crazy chords, I also have to talk about the famous The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. It’s a ballet that’s supposed to shock you. It’s supposed to depict the raw and the primitive: chaotic and uncivilized feelings. When you try to create that experience, you want something to be clashing, and you do that by performing notes that are only a half-step apart from each other. The effect of that clash feels very uncomfortable, and when the entire orchestra does the same thing, you feel even more uncomfortable. I mean, this production allegedly caused a riot.
When it was first released, people said it was terrible. They didn’t understand what was going on—actually, pretty similar to K-pop fans when NCT’s “Sticker” was released. These are sounds that you don’t normally hear; they carry shock value.
I appreciate that this means dissonant songs, K-pop and otherwise, are intentionally playing with the politics of taste. In this sense, dissonance is never accidental: it’s being made by musicians and producers who understand it as a feature rather than a flaw of the music.
To end, I’m curious about sonic trends more generally. What do you think the future of K-pop might sound like? What trends are you already seeing in 2025? This can also be what you’re hoping to see.
This question makes me feel like I should go through a playlist of what’s been released in 2025 already. What’s trending? Korea loves trends, not just in music but in fashion, makeup, and so many other industries. On the one hand, K-pop is going to sound like what’s in the top five trending worldwide songs right now. For example, in 2024, Charlie XCX’s BRAT did amazingly well on the charts. We’ve already heard songs that sound like they could have been inspired by BRAT, like LE SSERAFIM’s “CRAZY” and aespa’s “Whiplash.”
On the other hand, what I hope for is something different from what I expect. I’m thinking right now about ARTMS’s “Birth,” which came out in 2024. It was like nothing we’d ever heard before in the K-pop industry: one of my reactors called it “dark wave” or dark wave genre. More recently, TEN released “BAMBOLA,” which some of our reactors compared to polystylism and a spin on hyper-pop. That’s what I hope to hear more of because both of these songs are just so unexpected and so memorable, just very interesting to hear and analyze. In the end, that’s what I look forward to most: explorations of alternative genres.
When thinking about a recent trend, the songs written for the 2024 dance competition Stage Fighter come to mind. The show incorporated classical dancers, and every single song included a sample of classical music. I’m hoping that this dialogue with classical music continues in a way that inspires other acts. ATEEZ’s “Ice on My Teeth,” for instance, was a release last year that had such a movie-soundtrack-slash-classical feel blended seamlessly into a hip-hop boy group song. ONF’s “Bye My Monster” also featured a melody and chord progression from a classical piece and blended orchestral instrumentation with original content. I look forward to that kind of drama. At the end of the day, I love cinematic music that uses a wide variety of instrumentation to tell stories.
After all, why do people all over the world like K-pop? How does it resonate with them without them being able to speak the Korean language? I think the answer is that, like classical music, K-pop understands how to stage the instrumental and aural dimensions of a song in ways that connect with people. Ə
[1] Unpitched instrumentation typically refers to sounds made by instruments that have no “pitch” or melody to them, like drums, thuds, or hits. For an example of “unpitched” instrumentation, see the beginning of this video.
[2] For an example of detuned instrumentation, see the introduction of TEN’s "Enough for Me." The intro to the song features a synth that, when played along with a piano, does not match a single note the piano plays. That is because it has been detuned and will appear lower or higher in comparison to notes on a piano.
[3] See 39:55 for the thunderstorm moment.