Fascinated by both music and the visual arts from an early age, she trained as a classical pianist before deciding to study at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. On graduating With Distinction, the NAI Rotterdam, now called Nieuwe Instituut, commissioned her to create the sound art installation Chat/ Off/ Course for the 2001 Venice Biennale.

Shakespeare Und Heckenschere (2007) is a sonic spectacle for prepared table tennis and prepared hedge-trimming, combined with excerpts taken from iconic Shakespeare plays, which was commissioned by DEGEM and designed to the extreme reverberation of Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany. This piece was also performed at the 2014 ISCM World Music Days in Wroclaw, Poland, after the same festival selected her radiophonic sci-fi spoof Dr. NAUT (2008) to be broadcast on ABC Radio Australia.

Also in 2007, after a number of years living and working in Maastricht, Eindhoven and Amsterdam, she moved to a remote headland in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in order to concentrate on writing music. This encounter with a vast landscape, dominated by the feral rhythms of the weather, the seasons and the sea, has been the inspiration for all her subsequent work.

Tinnemans’ work reached an international audience when she was commissioned by the prestigious MATA 2013 festival in New York to write a work for ensemble and performers on custom-designed virtual instruments she coined field instruments, knitting together a natural soundscape in which strings determine time rather than pitch. This bold mix of disciplines made it to the Vogue NYC 2016 gala show for a next performance.

Similar bold combinations we can find in Étude (2012) for sports exercises with an ensemble of soprano, viola and electronics, commissioned by the Cultural Olympiad as part of the London Olympics. In a series of works such as Metro and Turner Piece (2015), commissioned by the Apartment House ensemble, as well as Page Turner Études Nº 1-3 (2017), commissioned by pianist Eleonor Sandresky, Tinnemans explores a sound world from within the deconstructed medium of sheet music itself.

Tinnemans’ landscape-sized graphic scores Landmannalaugar (2017) with a length of 23 metres, commissioned by the Lithuanian ensemble Synaesthesis; Central and Caponier (2018) with a combined length of 93 metres, commissioned by the Fort Process Festival in Newhaven, and Hraun (2020), for the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect, are now bundled in the ongoing series of Panoramic Books. In 2025 flutist Kathryn Williams performed Panoramic Book Nº VIII: Undertow and X (2025) at the Akademie der Künste and at KM28, Berlin, and Panoramic Book Nº VII: Whitesands (2025) for five musicians was performed by students at the Hochschule for Music und Theater in Leipzig. Examples from Tinnemans’ Panoramic Books graphic scores have appeared in Tempo Magazine.

Delving into historical archives, the Landmark Trust commissioned Tinnemans to write a choral titled Enduring Like A Tree Under The Curious Stars (2018), which is a quote from the poem A Peasant by Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, for the royal re-opening of Llwyn Celyn, an estate in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. The lyrics in the, now extinct, Gwenhywseg dialect sourced from the National Library of Wales, made these lost words echo through the valley once again, as they did nearly nine centuries ago when the estate had its initial opening in the year 1251.

In 2023 Tinnemans returned to historic documents. In collaboration with the Prize Papers Project at The National Archives, London, and the department of Social Sciences at the University of Oldenburg, she is developing a chamber opera set on the 17th Century Atlantic Ocean. An initial song cycle made from the archive materials is called Songs That Never Come Ashore (2024) for soprano, cello and piano, commissioned by Cwmni Mara in Wales, was performed by the Symffoni Mara Trio during the On Land’s Edge festival in Fishguard, Wales, in 2024. In these songs Tinnemans quotes from letters dating from 1664 she transcribed herself, which link to the Irish sea and ancestors of local inhabitants.

Taking vocalisations even further back in time, Tinnemans’ song cycle Verisimilitude (2016), performed by Icelandic Kammerkór Sudurlands, explores prehistoric wordless calls of our natural world, set on-location on the Snaefellsness peninsula landscape and glacier with the natural soundscape to play their part in their own way.

The British National Museum for Science And Media in Bradford commissioned Gramophony (2020-21) for their first dedicated sound exhibition called Sonic Boom. This sculptural composition, consisting of an ensemble of four sound sources which the audience can manipulate in speed and direction, emphasises on environmental awareness featuring recordings of the coastal soundscape of the Strumble Head peninsula in Wales, Tinnemans’ home for a decade.

The same landscape was the setting for the on-location piece At The Next Port Of Call (2021) for trumpet, tuba, seascape and Strumble Head lighthouse, commissioned by the On Land’s Edge festival. In this work the lighthouse becomes a giant metronome, directing the performers when to play, while gently guiding the listeners to take in the natural soundscape when the performers aren’t playing. Breakwater Brass (2022) was set on the Fishguard harbour breakwater, once again in Tinnemans’ familiar coastal patch, hocketing the sound of a full brass band against the surrounding cliffs, inspired by the echoing hooting of the ferry.

Staying with brass, Tinnemans wrote Dingus (2022) for big band, a 1930s Golden Age of Cinema-style soundtrack commissioned for the radio drama series with the same title, created by the playwright Mike Cooter, and it was nominated for an ARIAS award a few months later.

With Salomé (2019), composed for pianist Vicky Chow and performed at John Zorn’s The Stone, NYC, Tinnemans returns to her piano roots, followed by Seven Sisters (2021), which has been performed widely internationally. Inspired by mythical legends, these works are a commentary on the lack of identity these famous women are given. In Point. Line. Plane. And JoJo (the Cat) (2025), for piano, Kandinsky’s cat (who has been given a false name for confidentiality reasons) is proving how theory and practice don’t align, performed by Fidan Aghayeva-Edler during her 24-hour Komponistinnen Piano Marathon in 2025.

The Atalanta Festival für Komponistinnen 2026 in Berlin commissioned Tinnemans for the hour-long harp piece with the title Fermi Paradox, premiered by Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir on October 25. This work journeys through the rich sound world of conventional and extended techniques that the harp has to offer, and utilises sound objects, bespoke virtual instruments and a dramatised ingredient, turning the composition into a mesmerising production.