Ben Araujo (born 2002) is an American composer, sound artist, and pianist. His first exposures to music started at a very young age, beginning at age 5 when he started studying piano, but after discovering Unsuk Chin’s opera Alice in Wonderland, he developed an ever-growing passion for composition. He began writing his own handwritten sketches starting at the age of 9, but after joining the Very Young Composer’s Program at Lincoln Center in New York City in 2015, under the mentorship of Daniel Felsenfeld, Molly Herron, and Jon Deak, he began to compose even more seriously. Alongside this, he took private lessons with Daron Hagen from 2016 to 2020, allowing him to receive a fundamental education in composition. Further studies eventually took him to London, where he studied as a James Horner Scholar at the Royal College of Music under Haris Kittos from 2021 to 2025, and where he eventually graduated with a bachelor of music (BMus) with honors in composition. He then went on to spend a year at the Gotlands Tonsättarskola (Gotland’s School of Music Composition) in Visby, Sweden, studying under Per Mårtensson and Mattias Petersson.
He has developed a highly personal, experimental approach to composition in which he explores the physical and material qualities of sound, while also employing a more “Feldmanian” approach to time and development, in a way that allows sounds to simply exist in their own right without the need for them to “go anywhere”. In addition, he is interested, particularly with instrumental writing, in exploring the use of quiet and fragile sounds, as a way to provide a more raw, yet contemplative listening experience. Some of the many musical sources influential to his current musical language include genres such as electroacoustic music, drone, onkyōkei, and reductionism, as well as composers like Éliane Radigue, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Toshimaru Nakamura.
His music has been performed in a wide variety of venues and festivals across the world, such as the Royal College of Music (London), David Geffen Hall (New York City), the Lincoln Center Atrium (New York City), Kew Gardens (London), the Kyoto City University of Arts, the Wintergreen Music Festival (Nellysford, Virginia), the Music in the Alps Festival (Bad Gastein, Austria), the FRST Festival (Visby, Sweden) and the Ljudvågor Festival (Visby); as well as by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Ukrainian-American pianist Irena Portenko, various student musicians from the Royal College of Music (including the college’s New Perspectives Ensemble) and the Kyoto City University of Arts, and Swedish musicians/ensembles/organizations such as Ivo Nilsson, Jörgen Pettersson, the Zilliacus Quartet, and Audiorama.
Recent highlights include a sound installation for the 2025 edition of Sounds of Blossom Festival at Kew Gardens, a performative electroacoustic composition for analog synthesizer and fixed media, as well as a fixed media piece in 64-channel ambisonics format.