Ellen Arkbro (born 1990 in Stockholm) is a Swedish composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony and installation. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Despite her works' scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with
La Monte Young,
Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in
Catherine Christer Hennix's Kamigaku Ensemble. She originally trained as a singer with a focus on jazz, changed paths to study at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), and ultimately received a degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
