sound shaped Yanni Tan’s life.
It started with language. She grew up speaking Mandarin with her Malaysian father and Cantonese with her Vietnamese mother. When she was four years old, she began learning Spanish and she trained as a classical pianist.
Tan knew that the sounds of words and music were essential to her life, but she didn’t realize that her experience with words and music was different from other people until she was 12 years old. Her piano professor asked her to describe the melody in her left hand that she was playing. She replied that it sounded like red velvet.
Tan has synesthesia, a condition in which two or more senses intertwine – in her case, she experiences sound as color.
Andrew Broadhead, Natalie Feulner, Harry Gregory, Kurt Hickman, Adrian Kemp Rye
This unique recognition has infused her creativity across different fields. “I started using it not only for music, but also for reading and writing, creating new ways to interact with others even through technology,” she said.
Tan has played the piano all over the world and gained a YouTube following as a teenager. At Stanford University, she minored in music, but she designed her own visualizations in computers, which is her unique major that blended her interest in curiosity, creativity, and design thinking. did.
After taking a gap year in 2020-2021 and founding a voice-based social platform, she returned to campus with enthusiasm and a renewed passion for learning and creating.
Yanni Tan discovered that he had synesthesia while attending Stanford University, and says it changed the way he interacts with music. | Andrew Broadhead
She studied creative writing at Oxford University’s Stanford Program, where she helped revive the Stanford Student Entertainment Group and wrote, produced, and directed short films. Lily, about two musicians who become entangled in romance and rivalry. She is currently submitting the film to film festivals, and she hopes to continue directing films in the future.
Two of her recent projects have been inspired by Disney.She was drawn to soft robotics by a movie baymax During the winter quarter, I worked in Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in the Medical Lab to develop a wearable robotic sleeve. This spring, she wrote a Disney-inspired song series about a girl who can hear colors, which her closest friends performed at the Nitelli Theater.
I hope more people have the belief in being unique and the confidence to stand behind their ideas and work.”
The next step is Disney itself. As a technical supervisory intern this summer, Tan will develop his skills as a creative technologist, a profession that combines technology and design.
She then moved to Denmark for an internship with the Lego design team, and then plans to return to Stanford to earn an associate’s degree in computer science.
Whatever she creates next, Tan hopes to inspire others with her unusual way of seeing (and listening) the world. their creation. ”