Tini Aliman

Born in Singapore in 1989.

Tini Aliman (SG/DE) studied Interdisciplinary Music Studies at Berklee College of Music and works as a sound artist and composer, field recordist and audio engineer. Their practice sits at the intersection of theater and film sound design, live sound art performances, installation and collaborative works. Their research interests include, but are not limited to, ethnomusicology, spatial acoustics, bio-music, cartographical sonic epistemology, and data translations via biodata sonification.

Aliman has been involved in projects, performances and exhibitions presented at the National Gallery Singapore, NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Venice Biennale, Singapore Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf/Germany, UNSSC in Turin/Italy, ZHDK in Zurich/Switzerland, and SFMOMA. Notable past residencies include NTU Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore, Borderlands Residency at Ludwig Forum in Aachen/Germany, and a collaboration between the National Arts Council Singapore and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin/Germany. Aliman received the Best Theater Sound Design Award for 2023 for the play Kemas, presented at Esplanade Singapore. In 2018, the film Chinx Without Swords, a collaboration with Eric Lee, won Best Experimental Short Film at the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival.

One of their key approaches to capturing data from bio-music stems from the concept of silence and the silenced. While they do not specifically aim to anthropomorphize or translate this data into a language comprehensible to the human mind, their core practice as a sound engineer seeks to use technology to measure galvanic conductance in living beings—a form of bioelectricity—and transform that data into sound for deep listening, contemplation and understanding. Aliman values the concept of contemplation and deep soundlessness in their sonic practice, appreciating the negative space between the memory of a sound heard and the anticipation of the next one.

Tini Aliman is currently based in Germany.