Tessa Ying and the Boston Years That Shaped Her Piano-Led Electronic Sound

Singaporean pianist and producer Tessa Ying arrived in Boston to study and ended up staying for a decade. Her new single, AfterGlow, captures the musical identity she built there by blending classical piano with electronic production.

As featured by All Things Loud, Ying’s path to the United States opened when Berklee College of Music granted her the Asian Scholarship Tour Award. At the time, she was already earning a living in Singapore as a performer and piano teacher. The scholarship let her take on a dual major, combining music production and engineering with electronic production and design. She had wanted to step away from familiar surroundings and find out how a new environment would change the way she listened to and made music. What began as a period of study gradually became ten years of steady artistic development in New England.

Ying’s relationship with the piano goes back to the age of four, and her childhood was built around classical training. She credits Singapore with giving her a solid grounding. The American scene offered something different: a far larger and more varied community of musicians, along with listeners who actively seek out the niche genres she cares about. Boston rarely tops the list of music cities, since Los Angeles is better known for production and Austin for live shows. Yet Berklee attracts contemporary talent from across the world, and its graduates include Singaporean artists Corinne May and Nathan Hartono as well as Laufey, Charlie Puth and John Mayer. Ying believes the city’s thriving arts culture is often overlooked. She says Boston’s respect for the arts gave her opportunities to share her work that she could not have found anywhere else.

Working alongside musicians from so many backgrounds pushed Ying to rethink how she collaborates and performs. Electronic production had interested her for years, but in 2018 she committed to it more seriously, experimenting with everything from mainstream EDM to bass music and industrial electronic subgenres. Her attraction to the style comes from a fascination with sound technology: how the ear processes what it hears, and how engineers and producers shape a distinctive listening experience. Electronic music, where producers constantly test the limits of sound design, gave that curiosity an outlet. Her classical background stayed with her throughout. Ying points out that people tend to treat classical piano and electronic music as opposites, while in practice the two share a great deal and often feed into each other. Since graduating in 2019, she has released EPs and singles including Be On My Own and Dreaming in Flight, and has worked with artists such as Luis McDougal, Tommaso Annoni, Angelique World and Elisabeth Waters.

Moving freely between EDM, classical, jazz and funk circles helped Ying define her own place in music, and AfterGlow is the clearest result of that journey so far. The piano-led electronic track layers synths and atmospheric effects beneath a jazz guitar solo from McDougal, a Dominican-American guitarist based in Brooklyn. Its story comes from a recent trip. After taking in the vast scenery of Sedona and the Grand Canyon, Ying came home to Boston and watched an unexpectedly beautiful sunset from a rooftop patio. That evening felt like the final chapter of her travels, a lingering glow after the journey itself. She describes the single as a snapshot of where she stands today, returning to her piano roots while keeping the kick drum and sub bass that defined her last ten years of work. It also runs at a slower tempo than her earlier high-energy productions, reflecting a calmer sound she is embracing in her 30s. Her aim was to make something hopeful and uplifting.

Released on August 26, 2026, AfterGlow has already been added to two Spotify playlists, Relax and Chill and Mellow Grooves. One curator praised the growth in her piano arrangement, while another singled out her choice of sounds and the overall structure of the track. Behind that reception sits years of accumulated experience. Ying now has a wide set of tools and a clear sense of which sounds match the emotion she wants to convey, which allows her to work with more intention. Her music has also become more personal: rather than aiming for a particular genre, she concentrates on the story each track tells.

Looking ahead, Ying is developing more piano-centred electronic tracks and hopes to expand her list of collaborators. She is also returning as musical director for the youth musical theatre programme at the nonprofit Arts for Learning MA and is planning another piano concert for her students. Her story suggests that Boston’s music life is sustained by working artists who produce, mix and collaborate with one another every day, as much as by its famous institutions and concert halls.