Park Yeon was a Korean scholar-official and musician in the Joseon court. He is credited with developing a new type of pyeongyeong (C: biānqìng), a type of ancient Chinese lithophone percussion instrument, which he updated with the addition of pitch pipes.
Born into a scholar-official family, Park passed the Confucian exams and earned a position in the bureaucracy in 1424. However, soon afterwards he left his bureaucratic post in favor of serving as a court musician. In 1430, he studied Ming Dynasty treatises on ceremonial music, adapting them to Korean court music and developing new, simplified forms of ceremonial music which Korean tradition today says were easier to transmit to later generations.
