Adam Tinkle creates, teaches and writes about music, sound, media, and performance. Through his studies at Wesleyan University and at the University of California, San Diego, both international centers of experimental music, Adam has performed and worked closely with some of the most innovative and singular voices in contemporary American music, including Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser and Charles Curtis. In addition to performing rock bands and writing concert music, he creates large-scale site-specific compositions, including outdoor works for roaming musicians and audiences in Joshua Tree National Park, 2011 & 2012. An avid interdisciplinary collaborator, director, and designer, he has worked with dance-makers (Eric Geiger, Pedro Alejandro, Shayna Keller, Lux Boreal, Cal-Lab Kitchen International Choreography Symposium), theatres (No Face Theatre, Old Globe Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Baldwin New Play Festival) and performance artists (Marina Abramovic). These experiences inform his own fully staged music-theatre works, including whaleworks, which incorporates underwater sounds collected by marine scientists from the Scripps Institute, and A Mess of Things, his award-winning “illuminated radio play” and solo performance.

At the center of Adam’s work are strategies for artistic engagement, interactivity, and pedagogy that draw on experimental music tradition. In 2010, he co-founded the Universal Language Orchestra, a group of elementary-aged novice musicians that composed, improvised and built their own instruments. He subsequently created several similarly path-breaking arts education programs across San Diego county, where his collaborations with his students and his audience-participatory works were shown at the Birch Aquarium, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Carlsbad Music Festival, the Spring Valley Community Center, the Conrad Prebys Music Center, and the Institute of Perception.