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 is currently enrolled 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 whereby he explores the relationship between music and sound, with a particular focus on the physicality of sound and how it can change over time in a continuous fashion, in an attempt to create a space for the listener to be immersed in, thus allowing for a more attentive mode of listening. Some of the many musical sources influential to his current musical language include genres such as EAM (electroacoustic music), drone, ambient, post-rock and shoegaze, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Éliane Radigue, Roland Kayn, Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Daniel M Karlsson, as well as bands such as Sigur Rós, Swans, Radiohead, caroline, and Slowdive.
As a composer, 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 (Lincoln Center, New York City), the Lincoln Center Atrium (New York City), Kew Gardens (London), the Horiba Shinkichi Memorial Hall (Kyoto City University of Arts), the Wintergreen Music Festival (Nellysford, Virginia), the Music in the Alps Festival (Bad Gastein, Austria), as well as by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, pianist Irena Portenko, and various student musicians from the Royal College of Music (including the college’s New Perspectives Ensemble) and the Kyoto City University of Arts.
Recent compositional highlights include a sound installation for the 2025 Sounds of Blossom Festival at Kew Gardens, a piece for bowed electric guitar and live electronics, a collaborative theater piece involving actors, dancer, electronics and video, and a large ensemble piece composed for the Royal College of Music’s New Perspectives Ensemble.