It took a while before the people evaluating Park finally stopped treating every claim he made like something they personally needed to drag into court and cross-examine, but the melody-composition test was pretty much where resistance died.
By then they had already heard him create lyrics from nonsense, turn random objects into hooks, move the same ideas through completely different genres, and somehow make every version feel like it had been conceived for that genre rather than translated into it afterward.
The melody test was supposed to separate somebody who could write clever words from somebody who genuinely understood music, so one of the composers gave him a deliberately plain set of lyrics with almost no natural rhythm and asked him to make something out of them.
Another handed him an unfinished instrumental that stopped awkwardly halfway through a progression, while the A&R executive, who had apparently developed a taste for watching Park make ridiculous things work, pointed at one of NX Arc’s painfully corporate slogans on a digital brochure and told him to use that too.
Park had looked at the slogan for several seconds:
"Who wrote this?"
The New Talent Manager glanced toward the screen. "Marketing."
"They should be arrested."
The room laughed, but Park did it anyway.
He built one melody for the lyrics, rejected it himself, built another with a stronger lift into the chorus, then listened to the unfinished instrumental twice and filled the missing space without touching the original mood. When they changed one chord to see whether he’d been following a memorized pattern, he changed the melody around it before the new chord had even finished settling.
Then, Park turned NX Arc’s corporate slogan into a hook that sounded irritatingly usable.
He actually stopped afterward and frowned at himself.
Everything Park had said earlier about his musical ability had sounded arrogant because normal people were supposed to exaggerate when describing themselves. Park had somehow done the opposite:
If anything, telling them he could write in any genre, build around almost any sound, adapt to different voices and keep producing songs had been an understatement, mostly because there wasn’t a normal sentence available for my brain apparently treats music like breathing now.
From there, the audition became smoother.
Not easier, exactly...
...these people had careers built around being difficult to impress, and professional curiosity had already mutated into something dangerously close to scientific obsession. They simply stopped testing whether Park had been lying and started testing how far the truth went.
On the ear the senior vocal coach played a short melodic phrase once on the keyboard and asked Park to reproduce it. Park did. The coach repeated the phrase with one note altered and asked what had changed, and Park identified the note before the final sound had completely faded.
A producer played a four-chord progression, transposed it and asked Park to find the new starting point.
Another buried a wrong note inside a denser progression and asked whether anything sounded off.
Park pointed toward him. "Third chord, upper note."
The producer replayed it.
He looked toward the composer beside him.
The composer checked.
Park was right.
They made it nastier after that; adulthood did not cure people of taking a nineteen-year-old’s talent personally.
They layered harmonies and asked Park to separate them by ear, played short melodies once and had him return them in different keys, asked him to identify intervals without looking at the keyboard, then gave him a vocal line and told him to build a harmony above it, below it, and finally one that moved independently rather than simply following the original shape.
Every time they changed something, Park heard it.
At one point, one of the composers deliberately played a short section from a finished NX Arc track and asked Park whether he heard anything unusual.
Park listened.
"Do you want the polite answer?"
The composer stared at him. "No."
"The harmony under the last word is fighting the lead."
The producer responsible for the song frowned. "It isn’t."
Park shrugged. "Okay."
"Sing what you mean."
Park did.
He kept the lead line intact and changed the underlying harmony by a tiny amount, barely enough for an ordinary listener to explain, but enough that the phrase suddenly settled instead of pulling against itself.
The producer replayed the original.
Then Park’s version.
Then the original again.
His expression slowly became offensive to himself.
A woman farther down the table whispered, "I can’t unhear it now."
"Neither can I," someone answered.
Park smiled.
That was their problem.
By the end of the ear test, the room had stopped reacting every time he did something ridiculous because there were only so many variations of disbelief available to the human face.
A few of them had reached the exhausted stage where Park would correctly identify something, and they would simply nod as though of course he fucking did.
Lastly was the camera and microphone test, which Park had originally assumed would be the least interesting part.
He was wrong.
NX Arc wasn’t searching for conservatory students:
It made stars, and a singer who sounded incredible with his eyes closed inside an empty room could become painfully ordinary once a lens, studio microphone and several million viewers entered the equation.
They moved Park onto a marked section of the stage, adjusted the proper microphone and asked him to repeat part of his song directly toward the camera.
Park did.
"Again, but don’t look into the lens."
He changed his eyeline naturally.
"Three-quarter profile."
Done.
"Close-up."
They had him begin facing away, turn on a musical cue and find the camera, walk into his mark while singing, stop without looking down and continue the phrase. They adjusted microphone distance and asked him to compensate without destroying tone, then made him sing softly close to the mic before stepping away for a stronger passage.
The engineer listening through the system asked him to repeat several consonant-heavy lines because inexperienced singers had a habit of assaulting microphones with plosives.
Park adapted after the first instruction.
Perfect Crown loved cameras almost as much as Peerless Male Siren loved music.
Park did not have to consciously calculate every angle of his jaw or wonder where his hands should go. His body seemed to understand how much movement was too much, how stillness could become more noticeable than motion, where his face looked best beneath the stage lights and how to turn without accidentally presenting the camera with some awkward half-expression that would become a meme three hours later.
One of the music executives eventually muttered, "He knows where the camera is."
The camera operator, who had spent the last few minutes making increasingly small adjustments because Park kept landing exactly where he wanted him, answered without looking away from the monitor.
"No; he knows where the camera wants him."
Park tried very hard not to look pleased with himself, he failed a little.
By the time they finally let him return to the center of the stage, the technical tests were essentially over. They had heard the voice, tortured the range, stripped away accompaniment, forced him through harmonies, dragged him across genres, attacked his ear, tested spontaneous composition and then shoved a camera into his face to see whether all that talent survived being watched.
It did.
So the questions afterward were different from the ones they’d asked when he entered.
Less prove you belong here.
More what exactly are we supposed to do with you?
The A&R executive rested both hands on her tablet. "Why music?"
Park smiled faintly. "Because apparently one impossible career wasn’t enough."
A few people laughed, but she kept watching him, waiting for the real answer.
Park gave it, repeating the same answer he gave them without trying to act like a smarts.
"I like making something that wasn’t there five minutes ago...
"What kind of artist do you want to be?" one of the female producers asked.
"I don’t know yet."
She raised an eyebrow.
Park added, "I know what I want to try. That’s different. I don’t want to decide I’m one genre before I’ve even had a career. If I can do five things well, cutting four of them off because it makes the branding cleaner sounds kind of stupid."
The A&R executive nodded slowly.
"If music comes this naturally to you, why pursue acting?"
Park almost laughed.
Because what exactly did they know about his acting?
They had seen his audition before the System had properly turned that side of him into a monster too. Their comparison wasn’t unfair based on the information they possessed, but it was outdated enough to be funny; to them his current music talent was better than his acting...and they were wrong!
There was no reason to explain any of that.
"Because I want both."
The senior producer leaned back. "Even if music becomes the stronger career?"
"I’ll do both."
"And if one starts costing opportunities in the other?"
"Then I’ll manage it."
"You make that sound easy."
"For me, I think it will be."
There was that confidence again, but after everything they’d just watched, nobody laughed this time.
Park continued more seriously. "I don’t want to wake up ten years from now with a great music career and wonder what acting would’ve looked like if I hadn’t abandoned it. Same the other way around. If I have the ability to do both, I’d rather solve the scheduling problem than create regret because people told me careers are supposed to fit into one box."
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