About
Sound

DYOLO? (2026)
      For Interactive Installation   

Even As I Am Silent, and Am Not Wont To Speak (2026)
      For Vocal Sextet and Electronics   

The Fallen Leave Falls (2025)
      For flute, bassoon, piano, live electronics and video   

Yesterday Yet To Come 2 (2025)
      For installation, cassette tapes, and live electronics   

When Clouds Are One Cloud Till The Horizon (2025)
      For Mixed String Ensemble   

They Have Only Existence (2025)
      For Solo Percussion, Live Electronics, and Generative Video Score   

The Poetics of Waiting… (2025)
      Installation for Interactive Animations and Spatialized Sound   

Shards of The Untraced (2025)
      For String Quartet and Spatialized Fixed Media   

Events And Results (2024)
      Video Game   

Unsupervised (2024)
      For Electric Guitar Quartet and Light   

Place Each Body Part on the Box And... (2023)
      For Wood, Resin, Print, Force Sensors and 6-channel Fixed Media   

inhere nowhere (2023)
      For Mixed Ensemble, Live-electronics, and Spatialization  

The Forgotten Ones (2020)
      For String Quartet and Fixed Media   

Clouds (2019)
      For Flute and Live Electronics   

Visual

Warp (2025)
      For 4-channel Fixed Media and Audio-reactive Video   

Photography

Cloud of Sound, Sound of Cloud  

B&W

Color

About
Yanqi Chen is a New York–based composer, interdisciplinary artist, and sound engineer. Her works invite audiences into spaces where the invisible processes of time, transformation, and immersion happen. Drawing inspiration from visual art, social issues, nature, and personal experiences, her work extends from instrumental composition into electroacoustic music, installation art, and interdisciplinary formats that integrate real-time visuals, movement, physical computing, and light. Across these forms, she approaches different media as interdependent forces that evolve together in dialogue, creating perceptual environments that blur the boundaries of sound, performance, and experience.

Her works have been featured at festivals and conferences including Musiikin Aika (FI), Académie Internationale de Création Musicale (FR), Creative Dialogue (FR), MISE-EN Festival (US), SEAMUS (US), and SICPP (US), and more.  From September 2024 to May 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Barnard Movement Lab, where she conducted research on motion tracking, light design, VR, and spatialized sound, culminating in her first large-scale interactive installation. From January to February 2027, she will participate in the Leighton Artists Studios Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for a new interactive VR project.

Yanqi holds a Master of Music in Composition and Computer Music from the Peabody Institute of Music, where she studied with Felipe Lara, McGregor Boyle, and Geoff Wright. She also earned a Certificate of Professional Studies in Theory and Composition from the New England Conservatory, studying with John Mallia, Bert Van Herck, and John Heiss, and a Bachelor of Music from Skidmore College. She is currently a doctoral fellow in Composition at Columbia University, working with Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, Marcos Balter, Zosha Di Castri, Brad Garton, and Seth Cluett. She has also participated in masterclasses and seminars with Chaya Czernowin, Patricia Alessandrini, Thanasis Deligiannis, Liza Lim and Pamela Z, among others.
Upcoming Events

New Work
Istanbul, Turkey 
08-15-2026

Mediated Duration: Technical Memory, Cybernetic Operationality, and the Distortion of Time
2026 NYU GSAS Graduate Student Distortions Conference, New York
10-01-2026

New Work
Luxembourg Composition Academy 2026, Luxembourg
11-20-2026

New Work 
Leighton Artists Studios Residency, Banff, Canada
02-06-2026

Past EventsDYOLO?
Musiikin aika Time of Music, Viitasaari, Finland
07-05-2026

MISE-EN Festival 2026, MISE-EN Place, New York
06-17-2026

Even As I Am Silent, And Am Not Wont To Speak
Columbia Composers Presents Ekmeles
St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia Univeristy, New York
04-21-2026

Press
(Coming soon)



YANQI CHEN

last updated July 2026