Yu-Peng Chen

Browse piano sheets by Yu-Peng Chen on Zen Virtual Piano. Yu-Peng Chen’s personal style combines traditional instruments and a wide range of musical elements from eastern cultures with western harmonies and orchestral writing. For Genshin Impact he took western orchestral music as his basis and added “local colour” through different styles and instrumentation, from Renaissance lutes and polyphony to Middle Eastern harmonies on ney and duduk, or the pentatonic scale and ancient tonal melodies of Chinese music. In Liyue he adds occasional extended jazz chords to the simple pentatonic melodies. Choosing a western orchestra as the base and colouring it region by region suggests a design in which each place gets its own accent over a shared foundation. Chen was born in China’s Hunan province in 1984 and discovered the power of music early, on hearing Joe Hisaishi’s score for Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Hisaishi’s music had an important influence on him, as did that of John Williams and Rachmaninoff. He learned clarinet and piano as a child, studying at the Shenzhen Arts School and then at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he switched to composition and later graduated in Music Design and Production. Discovering music through a film score fits a career that later ran across film, television and games. After his studies he quickly built a career writing soundtracks for television, film and video games, and in 2009 he founded his own studio, Yinxu Culture. He then joined HOYO-MiX, the in-house studio of the game developer miHoYo, as composer and music producer for Genshin Impact, and won worldwide fame; the game’s success also led to collaborations with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Collaborations with five orchestras mark a long step from a studio founded in 2009. In his own words, most of the creative inspiration for Genshin Impact comes from the classical music and Chinese folk music he listened to when he was young. For him, whether he is working on a game or a film, the most important thing is to tell the story that needs to be told as well as he can. Since he traces the game’s music to the classical and Chinese folk music of his youth, its western orchestral base and its Chinese colours read as two halves of one memory. In 2023 he left to pursue other musical endeavors and has since been working on music for Justice Online, a multiplayer online role-playing game developed by NetEase. In July 2025 he signed an exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon, becoming the first Chinese composer to join the label; the relationship begins with a deluxe edition of his album FANTASYLAND, an orchestral suite of 11 pieces. Chen’s place as the first Chinese composer on the label, with an album that reflects his eastern and western fusion, makes the release read as a statement of the blend his game work was built on.

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