Nina Whiteman

earthed adj.

‘Having an electrical connection with the ground’

‘Dwelling or buried underground’ 

‘Connected to reality; grounded.’ (oed.com)

When Adam Swayne asked me to write a piano piece in response to the idea of ‘memorial’, I was immediately drawn to environmental concerns: the global climate crisis, a collection of thoughts around soil health, and the gradual demise of an avenue of mature lime trees in my local park owing to waterlogging.

The resulting composition is a memorial to one of these fallen lime trees. I asked: how could multimedia materials interconnect and communicate in real-time like a mycelial network in an act of commemoration?

The tree itself provides most of the work’s materials: soil from its root ball becomes a variable resistor in an electronic circuit, and its bark, roots, mosses and lichen provide visual textures in the video. The live performers enact the rituals of their network in response to light signals emanating from the video. Touch-activated tones create a sonorous homage to a lost tree.

Emerging from Nina’s BELOW GROUND project, the piece develops ideas and processes accrued through interactions with subterranean specialists and artists across disciplines. In particular, the use of soil as a touch-responsive sound source was first developed by David Birchall for our Sonic Gardening workshops in partnership with MUD (Manchester Urban Diggers). I am grateful to David for his expertise helping me develop the DIY electronics for the piece, and permission to borrow his concept.

The idea for Earthed also came from a wider investigation into the way communities bring about musical commemoration in response to catastrophes, shown in Adam’s CD 9/11:20.

Earthed was first performed on 22 February 2024 by Adam Swayne (piano) and Nina Whiteman (electronics) as part of The University of Manchester Lunchtime Concerts. It was commissioned by Adam Swayne, and is dedicated to him in celebration of over 20 years of friendship and a shared love of the outdoors.

Thanks also go to the wonderful technical teams at the Martin Harris Centre and RNCM.

I’m delighted to announce that I have been awarded a National Lottery Project Grant by Arts Council England for my project BELOW GROUND.

BELOW GROUND is a collaborative interdisciplinary project bringing people together to explore ideas of the subterranean. Artists across disciplines will meet geographers and urban gardeners and create multimedia, multisensory performances and workshops interacting with the community.

I’m fortunate to be working with a fantastic group of multi-skilled artists to create a series of performances in March and April. We have expertise in writing, movement, voice, improvisation, amplification, textiles, sculpture and more!

You can find more information and a ticket link on the BELOW GROUND tab (or click here).

‘Nina Whiteman produced a bloody blinding piece of music and art that laid bare the tragedy of automation and inner city living and its effects on nature, that was hilarious, whimsical, and often insane and disturbing. The only sentient being in the room. BRILLIANT.’ (Audience member at the Fuming premiere)

The Cybird Trilogy

I. Fuming (voice and multimedia, 20 minutes, 2022)

II. cybird cybird (piano and multimedia, 12 minutes, 2022)

III. Incandescent (trio and multimedia, 15 minutes [in progress] 2022)

Fuming grew from my feelings about crossing a busy ‘arterial’ city road to reach my local park every day. I recorded this soundwalk dozens of times, capturing the impact of the traffic on the acoustic environment, as well as the sounds of birds jostling to live alongside this anthropogenic noise. This ‘data’ was then fed to the Sample RNN computer by Dr Christopher Melen at the RNCM, who sent me a range of results. The machine had learned a variety of sonic features of my daily walk. Unsurprisingly, though, it couldn’t make qualitative judgements between ‘bird’ and ‘car’, and some interesting sonic hybrids emerged. These, along with ‘uncanny’ machine-learned environments form the basis for the fixed media electroacoustic audio in Fuming and cybird cybird. 

Research tells us that birds find it harder to learn their songs against a backdrop of traffic noise, and that their songs tend to occupy a narrower and higher bandwidth as a result of these stresses (e.g. Drooling and Popper, 2007 and Moseley et al, 2019). I began to imagine birds as hybrids of technology, flesh, feather, and imposing chaotic environment. The Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy claims (satirically) that all birds have been replaced by robot drones. I began to wonder what it would be like if they had. 

The Cybird Trilogy of multimedia works with live performers has grown from this engagement with machine learning, artificial intelligence and the natural world, and charts the ‘adventures’ of a cybird character that is inhabited and portrayed differently in each work. Its concerns are ecological, musical, and technological.

Further uses of technologies in the trilogy:

Holonic Systems (via the Holonist app) allows Movesense motion sensors to communicate with various software. The motion sensors are used to convert bird-like performer wing movements into audible phenomena, through control of playback speed (MaxMSP) and of a modular synthesiser app (MiRack). 

Holly+ https://holly.plus/ Holly Herndon’s voice model (deep neural network) was used to process real birdsong recordings. These feature in the in-ear soundtrack of Fuming and in the electroacoustic sound of cybird cybird.

AI images of birds were created for the videos using DALL-E mini, and later Craiyon.

AI videos were created using online generators such as Synthesia and Movio.

An analogue talkbox features in Fuming, where the output of the motion-sensor controlled modular synthesiser is fed into the performer’s mouth. Their mouth filters the noisy emissions, amplified by a microphone. 

Fuming was first performed at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester alongside other work created by the Machine Learning for Music (ML4M) working group in June 2022.

cybird cybird will be performed by Zubin Kanga in Sheffield on 8 October, and at Cafe Oto (London) on 13 October.

Incandescent will be performed for the first time at the University of Manchester lunchtime concert series on 10 November by Trio Atem.

The trilogy results from my work on Zubin Kanga’s UKRI Future Leaders project Cyborg Soloists. I’m grateful to Zubin for commissioning me to work on this fantastic project using new technologies: https://www.cyborgsoloists.com/

With enormous thanks also to Stephen Bradshaw for his assistance with MaxMSP programming for Fuming.

I was delighted to be commissioned by Riot Ensemble during 2020-21 to create a solo work for their Zeitgeist series, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

During 2020-21, touching our faces has become a forbidden act that endangers our health. However, research tells us that spontaneous facial self touch is a comforting mechanism, and that we can touch our own faces up to 50 times an hour without necessarily being aware that we are doing so (e.g. see Mueller et al 2019). 

Forbidden presents simultaneously as an elegy to facial touch and a dangerous act of rebellion. 

The work extends my exploration of video as score and notation. Here, the vocalist is informed of their pitches from the part of the face that is touched, and the camera focus guides vocal timbre.

I’m so grateful to soprano Sarah Dacey for her exquisite performance!

During the Covid-19 lockdown, I’ve started a series of homemade experimental music videos. The series is a quirky antidote to a rather grave situation that has particularly affected the arts and live music-making. It was initially inspired in part by Björk’s eccentric tour of her television (you can view that here).
It’s been a lot of fun to make, and a welcome distraction from isolation. You can view the series on Facebook and Twitter @ninawhiteman, and on YouTube (click here for the link).

I’ve been working for some time now on a piece for organ and electronics. This develops my interest in creating maze-like notational environments for performers to navigate. In this work, provisionally titled Escape! the score is in the form of a video also visible to the audience. It comprises a series of rooms that performers (and audience) navigate in turn under differing time pressures. The organ and electronics performers have comparable actions in response to graphic symbols (octave changes, timbre changes, vibrato) and their interaction varies from one leading the other to races through rooms to slow explorations in tandem.

Here’s a video of us talking at the beginning of the project: https://vimeo.com/357779018

And here’s an example of one of the rooms performers explore in the piece:

The collaboration has been funded by Goldsmiths, University of London, and the work will tour a range of festivals from Spring 2020.

In 2017 Kathryn Williams asked me to write her a flute piece to be played in one breath for her project ‘Coming Up for Air’. My response was Thread, where the player’s breathing is controlled by an in-ear sound score, whilst their fingers simultaneously navigate maze-like notation. Kathryn has recently recorded over 40 pieces composed to this brief, and they’ve been released on the HCR label. You can listen to Thread and all of the other composers’ fantastic creations by buying the CD (https://www.nmcrec.co.uk/huddersfield-contemporary-records/coming-air) or on Spotify here.

Read more about Kathryn’s project here: http://www.kathryngwilliams.com/coming-up-for-air.html

overcast

I’ve had a fabulous time working with the Vonnegut Collective on overcast. This was a commission from Kinetic (funded by Arts Council England) to create music to be experienced in a small space. You can read about my ideas in this interview: https://www.kineticmanchester.co.uk/nina-whiteman-interview

I really enjoyed writing a piece that was designed to be memorised so that performers could move, play in the dark, and have creative involvement in how the sounds unfold. This is something I’d very much like to explore again, along with use of lighting and strange string preparations! Thanks so much to everyone involved!

(Vonnegut Collective in rehearsal at Takk in Hatch, Manchester)

I’m now working on a piece for organ and electronics for Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua, and this research is funded by Goldsmiths, University of London. The collaboration involves a number of exploratory sessions, which we have been filming to document the process. More on this to follow, along with performance dates!