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Long inspired by global traditions and spontaneous music-making, Tina Blaine (aka “bean”) is a musician, composer and sound designer who served as executive director of Rhythmix Cultural Works from 2010-2022, establishing the organization as an “arts hub” and raising awareness of the importance of the arts on the island of Alameda, CA. She holds a Master’s of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University where she also taught for six years, and has composed music for NPR, video games, TV and documentary soundtracks. She currently performs with the Japanese taiko fusion ensemble Maze Daiko, and has recorded with Brian Eno, Carlos Santana, Mickey Hart, Tracy Blackman, Haunted by Waters, D’Cuckoo, and many other ensembles.
At Rhythmix, Tina produced hundreds of concerts and events including 18 public art walks featuring local artists of world music, dance and visual art traditions to bring the East Bay community together through the arts. In 2022, in collaboration with ODC/Dance and 13th Floor, she developed the soundscapes for their choreography in Island City Waterways:Uprooted, a series of site-specific performances of dance, theater and music, revealing the hidden stories of Alameda’s former Naval Air Station and Japantown that was fractured in 1941. Tina’s sound design was featured throughout twelve 75-minute immersive performances that took over 1500 audience members on a journey from the wings of peace to the wings of war and from boot camp to WWII internment camp.
During the pandemic, Tina spearheaded the effort to retrofit the Rhythmix theater and transform the organization’s programs into online offerings, including its signature Performance, Arts & Learning program (PAL). This multicultural arts education program expanded from serving 3,000 students annually in a live setting to reaching more than 45,000 students virtually throughout Alameda County via online access to assembly videos and resource materials. Tina’s collaborative spirit has supported many partnerships with artists and non-profits on a variety of projects, and her many years of local advocacy resulted in the City of Alameda’s first release of public arts funding in 2017. In 2022, she was honored with an Alameda County Arts Leadership Award and Commendation for her outstanding achievements and contributions impacting the arts community and the residents of Alameda County. In the fall of 2022, Tina stepped down as Executive Director of Rhythmix, and spent two months as a marine conservation volunteer at the Madagascar Research and Conservation Institute on the island of Nosy Komba. This experience ignited her interest in artistically exploring an emerging area of audio research which records the sounds of undersea worlds as a way of measuring the health of a reef and calling attention to this important global resource.
Tina embarked upon her exploration of musical interaction techniques in the 1980s, building electronic MIDI controller instruments and large-scale audience participation devices for live performance with the multimedia ensemble D’Cuckoo. She has written for numerous publications including Electronic Musician and the Journal for New Music Research, and is co-founder of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference. In 2008, Tina served as an artistic advisor at the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam and has also been honored for her inspiring, innovative work in the sciences by the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwestern Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA.
As an entertainment technology and museum consultant, her clients included a range of companies in the non-profit, education and entertainment sectors including The Tech Museum of Innovation, Thinkwell Design, Inka Biospheric Systems, Rapport, Inc., Yahoo!, and the Franklin Institute. Tina taught for five years at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, developing collective experiences that integrate game design, sonic discovery, and interactive media. Before joining CMU, she worked at Interval Research as a project manager and musical “interactivist,” leading a development team in the creation of the Jam-O-Drum, a collaborative audiovisual instrument on permanent exhibit at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Tina’s subsequent research and projects with CMU students have been featured exhibits at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies, Zeum's Youth Art and Technology Center in San Francisco, Children's Hospital and Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Give Kids the World Resort in Orlando, LABoral in Gijon, Spain and Ars Electronica's Museum of the Future in Linz, Austria.
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