Bang “Jovial” Xiao: Where Film Is Heard First, and Sound Earns Its Authorship
In an era where cinematic narratives are increasingly defined by their visual spectacle, Bang “Jovial” Xiao stands as a persuasive advocate for a more profound truth: the soul of cinema is heard, not merely seen. As a sound editor, designer, and re-recording mixer, Jovial has meticulously crafted a career that positions sound not as a post-production afterthought, but as the foundational narrative infrastructure of filmmaking. Her work, spanning award-winning festival films, experimental interactive works, and viral vertical dramas with millions of views, demonstrates a rare synthesis of technical mastery and artistic vision. Jovial is not a technician in service of the image; she is a filmmaker whose primary medium is the immersive power of sound.
From Anonymous Artistry to Festival Recognition
Jovial’s capacity for nuanced, narrative-driven sound is perhaps most powerfully demonstrated in a project credited discreetly to her: an award-winning short film dealing with politically sensitive themes. Serving as Sound Supervisor, she was involved from the pre-production stage, architecting a soundscape that served as the film’s psychological blueprint. Her task includes the complex process of giving form to the protagonist’s traumatic memory—manifesting a chaotic protest sequence within a nightmare.
Her creative process resembled that of an archaeologist meticulously excavating a lost auditory world, layer by layer. By researching historical audio and strategically stratifying sounds—pushing explosive elements into a distorted background while sharpening the visceral struggle in the foreground—she created a disorienting auditory experience that mirrored internal trauma. Her authorial decision came in the final montage, where she stripped away ambient sound to let a soaring score dominate, guiding the emotional climax with calculated precision. The film’s subsequent journey through festivals like the Melbourne Queer Film Festival and The Palm Springs LGBTQ Film Festival validated her approach, proving that sound could carry the primary emotional and thematic weight of a narrative.
Reconstructing a Vanished World through Sound
This commitment to sonic world-building finds its purest expression in her Foley work for the period film Neither Donkey Nor Horse. As the leading Foley artist, Jovial undertook the task of resurrecting the complete auditory reality of an early 20th-century medical setting. This involved meticulous creation of every sound—from the chilling precision of archaic surgical tools to the chaotic clutter of a traditional pharmacy. As a significant part of the sound design process, her work transcended simple effect addition; it was an act of historical reconstruction, providing the critical tactile texture that allowed the audience to authentically inhabit the film’s world. The project’s accolades, including the 2024 Student Oscar (Narrative Bronze) and Best Short Film at the Chinese American Film Festival, underscored how indispensable such dedicated sound craftsmanship is to authentic storytelling.
Pioneering the Sound of a New Media
While her festival work establishes artistic credibility, Jovial is simultaneously shaping the auditory frontier of digital storytelling as an In-House Sound Supervisor for GoodShort, a leading platform in vertical drama. In this format, often critiqued for its brevity, Jovial sees a unique challenge: to distill cinematic sound into its most potent, essential form. Her work on series like My Husband’s Nephew Is My Guilty Pleasure, which won Best Romance at the Vertical Shorts Festival, involves using sound to meticulously calibrate viewer’s emotion within seconds, amplifying intimacy and sharpening comedy with precise auditory cues.
Her influence extends to viral hits that define the genre’s popularity. Jovial has served as the sound supervisor on multiple micro-dramas that have collectively garnered tens of millions of views, including Bitchy BFF It’s Your Turn to Pay, This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia, and The Final Goodbye to the Closest Kin, etc. In these projects, she applies a filmmaker’s mindset, understanding that sound in a 90-second vertical drama serves to act as an amplifier of relentless dramatic tension—each sonic layer meticulously calibrated to intensify, and intensify again, the emotional stakes for the audience scrolling below. “We are codifying the grammar of a new format,” she notes. “But beneath that technical innovation, we’re often packaging very traditional, even cheesy, narratives. Our real progress isn’t in inventing new stories, but in learning and refining a craft, which makes the production process more industrial, more efficient.” Her success in this arena, blending high production value with mass appeal, demonstrates an exceptional ability to adapt core principles of film sound to the evolving contours of modern media consumption.
The Method: Synesthesia, Collaboration, and Cultural Translation
Jovial’s approach is fundamentally cross-sensory and collaborative. For an avant-garde film, she was tasked with conveying oppressive heat purely through sound. Her solution was a complex auditory palette: a high-frequency tremolo to simulate shimmering air, layered with sub-frequency rumbles to create a sensation of suffocating pressure. “The goal was synesthesia—making the audience feel a temperature through their ears,” she explains.
This technical ingenuity is always in service of the story, a principle forged through deep collaboration. Her role as Post Sound Supervisor for the interactive film The Case of the Missing Afikomen, selected by the 2025 Maryland Film Festival, involved managing a full sound team to navigate a nonlinear narrative. Furthermore, her background as a Chinese native working on stories rooted in diverse cultures from Black American history to Jewish family traditions, positions her as a cultural translator. She engages in extensive interactions with directors to ensure her sound design resonates with specific cultural and emotional contexts, ensuring authenticity that transcends generic sonic tropes.
The Resonant Author
Bang “Jovial” Xiao’s portfolio constructs a compelling argument for sound as a primary authorial force in filmmaking. Whether guiding the emotional climax of a festival-winning short, rebuilding a lost world through Foley, or defining the sound of the next viral micro-drama, she operates with the holistic vision of a filmmaker. Her work bridges the captured moment on set and the crafted reality of post-production, which proves sound is an indispensable architect of the audience’s cinematic experience. In confronting the fundamental challenge of all filmmaking, her ability to weave narrative coherence and deepen emotional depth through sound marks her not just as an exceptional sound artist, but also as a pioneering filmmaker for whom sound is the story’s vital, linear thread—not an accompaniment, but a parallel narrative, essential and whole.
