Tina Tallon: 2021-22 Rome Prize Winner

Tina Tallon, Composer

Tina Tallon was recently announced as a winner of the 2021-2022 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. These highly ambitious and competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the gift of “time and space to think and work” was awarded to thirty-five American and five Italian artists and scholars. Each winner will receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting in September 2021.

Her project “SHRILL” is being written for the Boston-based experimental opera company Guerilla Opera and is an interactive electroacoustic chamber opera which examines how bias in the development and regulation of voice technology has shaped society. Everything from microphones to modes of transmission have been optimized for specific voices, and the gendered and racialized invective surrounding people from underrepresented demographics in the media has changed very little since the dawn of the broadcast era. Told from the perspective of four minoritized vocal laborers, it will grapple with questions of virtuality, embodiment, identity construction, and power. The set will include novel sculptural electronic instruments that engage performers and audience alike in embodied explorations of the resistance that different media and forms of representation pose to equity and advancement. Ultimately, Shrill will entreat listeners to examine their own biases and advocate for voices that are silenced in our society by structural inequity.

Tallon is a Boston-based composer, computer musician, improviser, and arts documentarian completing her doctoral studies in composition at the University of California, San Diego. Her music has been performed around the world by ensembles and musicians such as the LA Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, wild Up, Talea, and Transient Canvas, and her work has received awards and grants from ASCAP, NewMusicUSA, the Barlow Endowment, and PARMA music, among others.

Over the past few years, Tallon has been researching the topic of technology bias extensively, and received notable attention after her first published article in the New Yorker. Also listen to NPR’s On The Media interview between Brooke Gladstone and Tina Tallon about her research on bias in voice technology.