Hanna Hartman is the mysterious, elusive Swedish queen of sound art! She first happened to me in the early 1990s, on Channel 1 of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, when I happened to hear a few of her early sound paintings. I wrote her at the Radio with my enthusiasm, but she seemed reluctant to take my passion very seriously, or maybe to take her own art as seriously as it deserved. She seemed bewildered at my relentless fervency. It is always hard to judge your own achievements. However, as the years passed she continued to produce a number of sound art pieces, and perhaps she was persuaded by others too, that she had an unusual talent for the medium, so to say. That is an understatement, though. I know of no other sound artist with the same uncanny feel for this art, with the same edge-walking intuition, the same delicacy of application, the same fastidious, discriminating touch, resulting in naked tangibility and tender transparency. She works her sounds in stark asceticism, never overdoing what she does, never overstating anything, always leaving the work at the right time. Her timing and her coloring are outstanding. Her works should serve as examples for everybody who works with sound as art, like composers of text-sound pieces or electroacoustic music, or indeed those who work with sound design of all sorts, with theater and radio etcetera. She has a lot to teach all those craftsmen and artists. I don't know how much she has studied and worked to get to this level of artistry, but the naturalness with which she creates seems to indicate that she received her intense ingenuity as a gift from higher spheres. She must have had this certain airy character of stubbornness and transparency right from the outset.

Hanna Hartman was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1961. She studied at Dramatiska Institutet (The Drama Institute; the State College for Film, Theater, Radio and Interactive Media) from 1989 – 1991. In 1992 she studied at EMS (The Institute for Electroacoustic Music, formerly The Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm). Since 1991 she is a freelance worker at the Swedish, Danish and German Broadcasting Corporations. In 1997 she continued studying Interactive Media at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm, and 1998 she was back for further studies at EMS. She moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1998, and to Berlin, Germany in 2000.
In 1998 she was awarded the Prix Europa Prize for her work Geräusche des Monats, and in 2000 the Karl-Sczuka-Förder Prize for her work Cikoria.
Her first full-length CD was released by the Swedish label Elektron in 2003.