Composer, Performer, Educator

Eric Ye is a composer, arranger, and songwriter for concert, game, film, and musical theatre, currently pursuing a Bachelors of Music at San Francisco State University. Equally at ease with a wide range of styles across diverse mediums, his influences include Bach, Ravel, Joni Mitchell, Mariah Carey, Richard Marx, Joe Hisaishi, Masashi Hamauzu, Thomas Newman, Stephen Schwartz,  Disney songs, and the soundtracks of Sailor Moon, Touhou, and Riverdance. A multi-instrumentalist, his primary instruments are piano and voice. Vocally, he is steeped in musical theatre and pop music in English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. He has performed in various jazz, chamber, and vocal ensembles at SF State and the Schola Cantorum of St. Dominic's Church of San Francisco.

 

As an educator, Eric's expertise is in game composition, using Japanese VGM literature as a basis. He is an instructor at the Southeast Asian Academy Online for video game music analysis and composition and will be offering the second run of the Video Game Music Bootcamp in Summer 2023. Over the summer of 2022, he first taught the bootcamp to students across the United States via Zoom, covering video game music literature and craft of game composition. In 2021, Eric was the lecturer for a first-of-its-kind course on the craft of game composition, Writing Japanese Video Game Music, at SF State, covering over 150 tunes from the hits of video game music canon over a semester. He has given guest lectured at Berklee College of Music and presented his work on game composition pedagogy at GameSoundCon. A lecturer at SFSU's Experimental College, he taught The Art of Pop Song, which surveyed hits songs and great artists from the 50's to present. His spring 2022 course Productivity 101 teaches students how to build a successful semester by setting fundamental habits such as sleep schedules, to-do lists, organizing and structuring days, and getting distraction-free work done.

 

In addition to being an active film composer whose films have been featured in multiple screenings at SF State and the Roxie Theater, he is the director of the RGB Arts Festival at SFSU. The RGB Arts Festival is an annual student-run inter-departmental festival consisting of three concerts: Dance Fest, Film Fest, and Song Fest. Music students collaborate with students in artistic disciplines from other departments to create and perform new works.