Music and Sound Bio

Tina Pearson is a composer, performer, and a facilitator of sound-related projects, including concert and networked performances, workshops, soundwalks and interventions. She is fundamentally informed by her Canadian Shield origins and extended periods residing in wilderness environs.

Pearson performs with extended flute, vocalization, tuned glass, accordion, virtual instruments and simple objects. Her playing is guided by depth of listening and bringing to the fore voices, sounds and places that have been unspoken, unnoticed or forgotten.

Pearson’s work often includes eco-mimicry, altered, just or micro tunings and spectral-temporal investigations, and usually incorporates a focus on breath, attention states and/or stretched modes of performance practice. She sometimes employs the harmonic series as temporal structure, and plays with sonic phenomena such as beats and difference tones as a method for developing sonorities. As a sonic mimic, Pearson’s ongoing practice includes attempts to embody the sonic behaviors of creatures, plants, wind, water, and machines in both her playing and composition.

Pearson’s projects and collaborations often stretch or blur categories such as composer, performer and audience. Her ongoing association with the global collective, the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, includes collaboration across distance, culture, discipline and language. She frequently works with both skilled musicians and unschooled community members. List of compositions 

Pearson’s work has been performed and/or broadcast in Canada, the United States and in Europe. She has collaborated and/or performed with many artists, including Ellen Fullman, Pauline Oliveros, Stelarc, David Mott, James Tenney, Anne Bourne, Christine Duncan, Norman Lowrey, Paul Walde, Viv Corringham, John Oswald, Gordon Monahan, Leif Inge, Bjorn Eriksson, Andreas Mueller, Chris Tonelli, Gayle Young, John G. Boehme and Anne Schaefer among others, and with the New Music Cooperative, Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise, Arraymusic, Gamelan Madu Sari, LaSaM and Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. She has created and performed music for dance performances by choreographers Paula Ravitz, Denise Fujiwara, Grant Strate, Menaka Thakkar, Mia Blackwell, Jennifer Mascall, Constance Cook, Lori Hamar and Jung-Ah Chung and musical soundscapes for numerous spoken word performances. Her compositions have also been used in video projects by Liz Solo, Grace Salez and others.

Pearson was director or co-director of collaborative projects with the New Music Co-operative in Toronto including Oxygen Tonic (with David Mott, Toronto Centre for Photography); Colliding, (with Bob Stevenson and T.I.D.E. at Harbourfront); and In Tune with the Moon (Art Gallery of Ontario). Since 2007 in Victoria, she has co-directed LaSaM Music‘s projects And Beethoven Heard Nothing (with Dylan Robinson) and In a Large Open Space and directed and composed for Open Space projects such as Quantal Strife Sound and Victoria Complaints Choir. Her collaboration with intermedia artist Paul Walde, Music for Natural History, was presented at the Royal BC Museum in 2012 and 2016. Tina also directed and composed for the virtual reality collaboration Rotating Brains / Beating Heart with the Avatar Orchestra, Pauline Oliveros, Franziska Schroeder and the Australian performance artist Stelarc.

Pearson has been a curator of new music and new media, an editor (Musicworks magazine) and regularly gives workshops and classes in improvisation, vocal exploration, soundwalks and creative musicianship. She was an instructor at OCAD University, and has been a workshop leader / guest instructor for the Feminist Rock Camp, Victoria Complaints Choir, OCAD University, Mills College, MediaNet, Camosun College, Association of Women in Music, and others.

Pearson currently resides in Victoria, BC. Since 2007, she has performed with LaSaM, a Victoria, BC new music ensemble she co-founded; and with the global collaboration Avatar Orchestra Metaverse in the virtual reality platform Second Life. She also collaborates with Oslo-based artist Leif Inge as the Metanaut Duo.