Bora Yoon


Bora Yoon is a Korean-American experimental electroacoustic composer/performer known for her use of unconventional instruments and musical technology in her music. An interdisciplinary sound artist, vocalist and TED2014 Fellow, she gathers and uses instruments and timbres from various centuries and cultures, to create immersive audiovisual experiences, with architecture, and acoustics.

Early life

Yoon was born in Chicago, Illinois. She completed her undergraduate studies at Ithaca College’s Conservatory of Music and Writing School, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University.

Body of work

Yoon uses unconventional sound sources to generate music, and illuminate the invisibility of environment, sound, space, and architectural acoustics and psychoacoustics—to create a storytelling through sound.
In her work, she has used the human voice, violin/viola, water, ancient Tibetan singing bowls, cell phones, music boxes, glockenspiel, guitar, walkie talkies, metronomes, shortwave radios, kitchenware, found sounds, and electronics.
As a performer, Yoon has toured her experimental soundwork internationally at venues including the Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Singapore Arts Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, the KBS/Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, the Festival of World Cultures, and various galleries, universities, and performing arts centers around the globe. She composes music/sound for film, theater, and dance, including an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Collaborations

Yoon's wide-ranging musical skills have yielded a diverse collection of collaborators across many genres and disciplines which include:
As a composer, notable spatial-acoustic works with unusual architecture include stereophonic sound mural “Doppler Dreams” for seven sopranos on bicycles in Brooklyn’s, empty McCarren Pool for the site-specific dance piece Agora II, and created and performed the multi-speaker live sound score for the aerial dance piece Rapture, reverberated off the dynamic curves of Frank Gehry’s Fisher Center as part of a collaboration with award-winning choreographer Noémie Lafrance.
Choral commission "Semaphore Conductus" created for the Young People's Chorus of New York City is inspired by the conduction of energy, signals, and the evolution of communication devices over the centuries. This is sung in surround-sound, creating an activated sound field for the audience, and lives between the space of a choral performance work, and sound installation.

Multi-format releases

In 2014, Yoon published a multi-media release for master work 'Sunken Cathedral', which was first released as
Inspired by turning the lens of architecture inward, to the architecture of the subconscious, and the mind. The album was a culmination of major works created from 2006 ~ 2013, and featured guest artists New York Polyphony and poet Sekou Sundiata.
The staged multimedia work, directed by Glynis Rigsby, reflects Buddhist philosophies of cycles and orbits as well as issues of identity Yoon’s Korean heritage. Featururing immersive video design by Adam Larsen, 'Sunken Cathedral' premiered the world stage to critical acclaim, and was presented by the Prototype Festival and LaMama Experimental Theater Club, and co-produced by HERE Art Center and Beth Morrison Projects.

Discography