Sylvia Lim is a composer based in the UK. Her works are intimate, exploring a small amount of material in depth – often a single sound, texture, or entity. She is interested in the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness and instability. Her music is influenced by natural phenomena and the visual arts. She works very closely with musicians, visual artists and dancers. 

Sylvia’s music has been performed and/or workshopped by Plus-Minus Ensemble, EXAUDI, CoMA Singers, Liam Byrne, Natasha Zielazinski, Musarc, BBC Singers, Fournier Trio, Kaleidoscope Saxophone Quartet, tick tock, members of the Aurora Orchestra, and members of the London Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been published in the CoMA Partsong Book, and performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival, Cambridge Female Composers Festival, and Barbican OpenFest’s Unfinished. She was on the LPO Young Composers Programme and Psappha’s Composing for Piano scheme in 2019/20, and is now on the RPS Composers Programme as a Rosie Johnson RPS / Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer. 

Sylvia completed her PhD (‘Exploring organic decay through sound’) at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she also gained a first class Bachelor of Music (Honours) and a Master of Music with distinction, winning the Ian Horsbrugh Memorial Prize for Composition in 2015. She now teaches composition there.