Mark Xiong
Entrepreneur & Builder
01 / profile
The Art of Intentional Building
Mark is an entrepreneur and builder who creates user-facing products that make people actually feel something—preferably laughter, or joy brought by the disappearance of tedious work. He's drawn to projects that sit at the intersection of technical challenge and emotional payoff, where clever engineering meets genuine human delight or genuine productivity gains.
Growing up in China and living across the UK, Paris, and the US shaped his approach to design: he specializes in multicultural fusion, blending Eastern and Western aesthetics in ways that feel natural rather than forced. Whether it's sampling guzheng over trap beats or building social apps, he's interested in how cultural elements can remix into something entirely new.
Mark's creative sense pulls equally from fashion runways, basketball courts, and Formula 1 circuits—he believes good design borrows shamelessly from everywhere. His work spans beat production, computer vision experiments, and mobile apps, united by a philosophy that technology should either simplify your life or make you smile. Ideally both.
02 / works
Selected Software Projects
Snowmap
Ski resort info platform helping skiers find the best snow & plan their ski trips.
DrinkUpLakeMichigan
Playful hydration tracking & habit formation through physical-digital integration. Automatically detects drinking behavior and enables social accountability.
Voice Ping Pong
Voice-controlled gaming with spatial audio — using voice commands to control gameplay and spatial sound to communicate ball position.
LeGoat Detector
Real-time facial expression recognition system that detects different expressions and displays corresponding LeBron James photos.
03 / sound
Sampling as Cultural Dialogue
A three-track exploration of hip-hop production techniques, investigating how sampling functions as conversation—with genre conventions, musical archives, and cross-cultural traditions.
155 — Genre Study
Deconstructing Travis Scott's atmospheric trap aesthetic. Layered synth progressions with classic 808 patterns at 155 BPM. Understanding how psychedelic textures balance with rhythmic aggression.
All Around
Sampled Marvin Gaye's 'All The Way Around' — transforming linear soul samples into cyclical soundscapes through reversal techniques. Using one segment as intro, then reversing another clip with effects for the main loop to create new emotional contexts.
Silk 808 — Cultural Synthesis
Bridging traditional Chinese guzheng with contemporary hip-hop. An exploration of cross-cultural sampling, integrating guzheng melodies into modern beat structures while navigating pentatonic and Western tonal systems.