SOUND, COMPOSER

MICAELA TOBIN

Composer and sound artist Micaela Tobin wields her soprano voice against the confines of convention, specializing in experimental and contemporary realms of opera and noise. Micaela focuses on building connections between the physical voice and one’s "inner" voice as a means of empowerment, challenging colonial stories and systems. Integrating voice with electronics, ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism, she weaves dynamic music that is at once alluring and demanding.

With her primary project, White Boy Scream, Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through hardware, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and sound walls. Here, she explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Her most recent full length album, BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc), includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, The New Yorker asserts, “Opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire. Her upcoming album, APOLAKI, continues this thread, already declared by Passion of the Weiss as “a brilliant showcase in the evolution of her art [that] pushes her alchemized sound to its absolute limits.”

As a composer and director, Micaela presented her cinematic debut at REDCAT in May 2021, titled "BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons," as an adaptation of the synonymous album. Continuing her series incorporating the precolonial mythology of the Philippines, Micaela premiered her second opera in July 2023, "APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth," at the historic Zorthian Ranch.

Micaela is a proud recipient of the 2024 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Award as is excited to bring her immersive practice from Los Angeles, CA to Tulsa, OK.