Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist that has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and moved to the United States in 1972.

Yasunao Tone is known mostly for his musical work, much of which relies on unconventional techniques. Tone began manipulating compact disks to achieve uniquely mangled sounds in the early 1980s. For his 1985 album, Solo for the Wounded CD, he damaged audio CDs and used the information that a CD player was able to extract from those discs to create new pieces. Tone doesn't make use of a traditional sampler, however though "de-controlling" the playback of the CD audio, his works consist of samples played back in an unexpected (almost random) order. Tone has stated that the error-correction functionality of modern CD players has made it hard to continue to use this technique and, for this reason, he continues to use older equipment. For his collaboration with Hecker, Palimpsest, he converted Japanese Man'y?sh? poems to sound.

Always active in United States with avant-garde music artists, he has been awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a New York State Council on the Arts commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for collaborative work with Blondell Cummings and Senga Nengdi, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance/emerging forms.