We were lucky to catch up with Vivien Lalu recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Vivien, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.

My first paid gig in the video games business. The company itself, Neko Entertainment, was mostly a subcontractor to Ubisoft, one of the biggest video game companies in the world. Even their office was next door to Ubi. Their usual composer was not available at the time, and they needed someone to make music for their new Nintendo DS app.

Laurent Lichnewsky, the studio director, received me in his office in Montreuil. He was pretty grim about the whole thing, like, “We’ve talked to a lot of composers, but as soon as we give the Nintendo DS development kit to them, we don’t hear back from them. It’s too complicated.”

I asked Mr. Lichnewsky to let me try, and the studio trusted me enough to hand me a full dev kit.
Guess what… I came back home, studied the manual, and that same evening around eleven sent a first preview of the theme running and playing through the kit. The rest is history… I ended up making the music for their games and app.

One evening after Cocoto Alien Brick Breaker was out on the Nintendo eShop, Laurent Lichnewsky gave me a phone call. He just wanted to tell me that he played through the game with his kid, loved the soundtrack, and they were beating levels in anticipation of what the music of the next level would be. This was the most sincere and best feedback or “compliment” a client could ever give me!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am Vivien Lalu, a music composer, sound designer, and audio branding specialist born in Paris, France. I have composed music for Celine Engelstad (a Norwegian jewelry company headquartered in Oslo, Norway), Carrefour Group (one of the world’s leading retailers), Warner Bros. movies, sound design for Ubisoft (one of the largest video game developers and publishers), and Roland Corporation (a leading manufacturer and distributor of electronic musical instruments), etc.

My parents were musicians in the ’70s—they were in a band together, and I’ve basically followed the same path since birth. I grew up playing my mother’s Moog synthesizer, which hung in the living room, and sitting on the drummer’s lap, hitting his drums at my parents’ rehearsals. Music has always been a huge part of life in my family, but nobody did it professionally before me.

So, I am like a Sonic Experience Creator who will craft the perfect soundscape for any project.

Being original is very important. Clients nowadays often rush to pick tracks from an “already made” song database. But I’m not a database. I create original sounds, tailored to the client’s vision and in alignment with their “brand book” or “sonic DNA.”

This is what sets me apart, I guess. Creating original music and sound is far better—presenting your own vision for your product or service is way more impactful than using stock audio that everyone else is already using.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Even though I grew up surrounded by music, and playing music, this wasn’t supposed to be my future. I was actually drawing a lot and got my Applied Arts diploma that was supposed to help me become a full-time graphic artist. But joining a band at school made me take a radical turn…

I ended up composing and producing music for a lot of different albums and projects through the years. Until 2008, when the son of President Nicolas Sarkozy made me his Studio Manager and co-composer. I didn’t even want to believe it at first—I thought they were talking about the son of the label’s President, or the company’s President, not the actual French President. I had no connections of any kind; this happened purely because of a recommendation about my work. Being part of the President’s son’s entourage was insane. A completely surreal period of my life!

I guess the second milestone was the day my parents were with me at our local cinema where they used to bring me when I was a kid, and my music – the music of their son – was playing in the background of this Warner Bros. movie. It’s the day when even I realized that things were becoming serious… Then another key milestone was years later, when my daughter was playing a video game on her Nintendo WiiU, and the music was also mine. our family’s name was listed in the credits… more came—such as the day Roland Japan invited me to join them in Frankfurt, Germany, to start a collaboration together. That’s how I ended up designing the official “Celestial Spheres” sound library for their JD-XA synthesizer. Crazy, considering I first rented their keyboards for a week-end as a teenager because I couldn’t afford them. I never knew that one day, I’d endorse them as an artist…

This is the kind of moments when you realize how far you’ve come compared to when you started. The kind of moment that validates the reason why you never gave up—to make an impact with your passion and hopefully show others that, for them, too—it can be done. My children know that they can reach their dreams if they stay resilient, believe in themselves, and never give up!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

“Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz”. Not just a book about running Sprints at your work place…this opens a whole new world, even in your personal life. It’s not just a method, it’s also full of actual examples of problems companies had to face and how they overcame them.

This showed me ways to think and solve problems differently. You can always take a step back and look at any situation from a wider perspective, and see that there are not “good” or “bad” solutions but maybe instead: solutions that are fast to put in place, without a big impact. Or those that ask for a lot of effort without a big impact, and of course we’re all looking for the ones that are easy to implement and deliver great results.

Also the importance of sketching things sometimes…all in all, a great inspiring book for anyone! Applicable at home or the office.

Other important resources for all entrepreneurs, I think, are podcasts. Not talking about making one (even though it’s a great idea), but listening to them—lots of them. YouTube is visual and takes over your attention/concentration, and it doesn’t work the same way as podcasting apps do.

What I love about podcasts is that, thanks to them, I’m still learning non-stop—from morning to evening—while doing groceries, cooking, traveling. There is never a moment when I don’t learn. I listen to podcasts all day, and I think it’s a very good thing to do.

Special shoutout to my favorite one: StarTalk by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice. Because I love learning about our real world and the science behind it, when I’m not locked into my music “escape world”—especially when it’s done with so much talent and humor!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vivlalu/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vivlalu
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivienlalu/