How Classical Piano Training Led Tessa Ying to Electronic Music
Classical piano and electronic dance music are often seen as two worlds with little in common. Singaporean producer Tessa Ying has spent the past decade in Boston building a sound that connects them.
As covered by All Things Loud, Ying’s move toward electronic production grew out of a deep curiosity about sound itself. She is fascinated by how the human ear interprets what it hears and by the methods producers and engineers use to give listeners a one-of-a-kind sonic experience. Electronic music, a field where producers keep pushing the boundaries of sound design, turned out to be the natural place to pursue that interest. The attraction had been with her for years, yet it was only in 2018 that she began working in electronic genres in earnest, moving between mainstream EDM and more specialised styles such as bass and industrial electronic music.
Her classical side came first. Ying started playing piano at four and spent her childhood and teenage years in formal classical training in Singapore, later working there as a musician and piano teacher. She believes the gap between that tradition and electronic production is much smaller than most people think. In her view, the two share many elements and continually shape each other, which is why her piano skills never became a thing of the past once she started working with synths and drum programming. Instead, they became one of the foundations of her electronic work.
The bridge between these two musical lives was Boston. Ying received the Asian Scholarship Tour Award from Berklee College of Music and enrolled in a dual major covering music production and engineering together with electronic production and design. Leaving Singapore was a conscious step outside her comfort zone. She wanted fresh perspectives and a wider musical range, and the United States offered a bigger and more diverse network of musicians, along with audiences who appreciate niche genres. Boston is less often associated with music than Los Angeles or Austin, but Berklee brings together leading contemporary musicians from many countries, and graduates such as Corinne May, Nathan Hartono, Laufey, Charlie Puth and John Mayer began their careers there. Ying considers the city’s arts life one of its most overlooked strengths and says the support Boston gives to artists allowed her to share her music in ways that would have been hard to achieve elsewhere. Meeting musicians with very different backgrounds also changed how she approached collaboration and live performance. After finishing her studies in 2019, she kept producing, released EPs and singles including Be On My Own and Dreaming in Flight, and worked with Luis McDougal, Tommaso Annoni, Angelique World and Elisabeth Waters, while spending time in EDM, classical, jazz and funk communities.
Her newest single, AfterGlow, brings all of this together. Released on August 26, 2026, it is a piano-led electronic piece with synths, atmospheric effects and a jazz guitar solo by Luis McDougal, a Dominican-American guitarist based in Brooklyn. The idea came from nature. During a trip, Ying took in the enormous landscapes of Sedona and the Grand Canyon, and after she got back to Boston, a surprisingly vivid sunset seen from a rooftop patio felt like the last chapter of that journey. Musically, the track returns to her piano roots while keeping the kick drum and sub bass that have defined her electronic output. It also moves at a slower tempo than the high-energy productions she favoured in the past, a change she connects with a calmer phase of life in her 30s. The single has since appeared on the Spotify playlists Relax and Chill and Mellow Grooves, and curators highlighted both the maturity of the piano arrangement and the quality of the sound design.
Over the years, Ying has gathered a solid set of production tools and a sharp sense of which sounds express a particular emotion, and that knowledge lets her make more deliberate choices. Her music has become more personal as a result, with each track built around a story rather than the expectations of a genre. She is now working on further piano-focused electronic tracks and looking for new artists to collaborate with. At the same time, she will again serve as musical director for youth musical theatre at the nonprofit Arts for Learning MA and is preparing another piano concert for her students. Her journey is a reminder that a city’s music scene grows through the everyday work of artists who keep creating and collaborating with one another.
