"It's never too late to be what you could become"
George Eliot

Claudia Criscuolo, stage-name Sya (pronounced Sea-ah), is an artist from Rome, Italy – a singer, a composer, and an arranger of music.

Her love for the art emerged when she was a child. She studied piano and guitar and, when she was ten years old, she "discovered" her voice – her natural talent. A few years later she composed her first songs and wrote her first poems.

Her voice is often compared to that of Mina and sometimes even mistaken for it, because of its timbre and range. After years of studying and research she has acquired a personal style that has rendered her a wonderfully communicative interpreter in song. Always an experimenter with her vocal instrument, she has full command of it, with excellent intonation and sense of time, and an innate sense of rhythm. She uses tones and overtones, sweeping fluidly from low to high, and venturing into harmonic sounds.

Although she began as a singer of light modern music, her versatility has allowed her to expand her range into other types of music, including classical. While preferring jazz and spoken word styles, she has nevertheless been able to demonstrate her overwhelming strength and mastery – that of improvisation. Because she gave precedence to her role as a mother, she has attained neither widespread fame nor glory in her singing career.

Her curriculum vitae is not replete with the names of the famous musicians who might have been her collaborators, although she did have the privilege to work with the jazz legend Tony Scott, and with the group "Area". She is pleased and proud to have worked with many other talented musicians, whose skills she has always recognized and appreciated and who have, in turn, significantly enriched her own experience of music.

In 1984, she completed nine new songs in collaboration with Lucio Macchiarella.

In 1993 she set off on a spiritual course which she continues to follow, and which brought her, in 1999, to record a song of her own composition entitled "Alba (Daybreak)". "Alba" was entirely improvised and inspired by the process of image visualization. In this song, Sya employs her voice as an instrument of sound transmission that "goes beyond comprehensible words." A music critic described the track in this way: "In 'Alba', the elements of her voice, because of their extraordinary tonal qualities, echo and superimpose themselves one upon another until they resound together. This is possibly one of the most sacred works performed by a singer of world music, in which the music becomes a dream-like delirium and an incursion into the mind of the listener."

The ambitious aim of Sya's singing is to "make people's lives resonate", or better, to succeed at making others perceive their own intrinsic potential and to encourage in them a desire to manifest it. This, for her, should be her ultimate purpose as an artist.