A high school student in Shanghai is combining music and technology with community service, from piano performances at a local hospital to plans for a student-led music data competition.
Chen Yinte, a student at Shanghai High School International Division, founded the Youth Music Innovation Initiative in 2020 to promote music technology and expand access to music through public service.
Chen has played the piano for patients and their families at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital regularly since 2026. Each performance lasts about an hour, with his volunteer work totaling around five weeks over the course of a year.
His repertoire includes Mozart's Turkish March, Liszt's Consolation and Debussy's The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, as well as jazz piano pieces. He selected the works for their accessibility to a broad audience and suitability for a hospital setting.
Chen's involvement in music outreach dates back to 2022, when he began performing in benefit concerts organized by his piano studio for children with autism. Held once or twice a year, the concerts feature solo performances and collaborations with other musicians.
Beyond performing, Chen is exploring the use of technology in music. He has researched AI-generated music and trained recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory models using classical music datasets.
His paper, "The Popularity of AI-Generated Music: Trends, Genres, and Influencing Factors", was presented at the seventh International Conference on Computing and Data Science in Chicago in 2025. A related paper is under review at an SCI-indexed journal.
Chen has also obtained software copyright registration for an AI music generation system he developed and filed invention patent applications in China, Germany, and the United States.
YMI is preparing its first major initiative, a music data competition for young participants to be hosted on Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions and collaborative projects.
The idea was inspired by Chen's own experience with the platform. In September 2025, he won a bronze medal in a Kaggle community competition, ranking 224th among 2,713 teams.
Through YMI, Chen hopes to use music technology to create opportunities for young people — including those without formal musical training and children with special needs — to explore music creation.
He is now developing the initiative's website and expanding its community service programs, with plans to bring the competition and music outreach activities to more cities.
