| ITEM NO: |
RELIC NAME: |
DESCRIPTION: | DATE OF ACQUISITION: |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | Altruism | A listening device inviting cross-species and human-machine explorations of sound and beauty. |  |
Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living.
—
Movement I: ‘Alarm Call’
‘Alarm Call’ is long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of— and call out to—non-human beings?
Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, algorithmic modulation, and machine learning, I fold the human alarm calls, such as sirens and morse code, into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations that increase in sophistication and complexity over the course of the piece.
Movement II: ‘AI-Truism’
Most AI-powered music-making tools exist to mimic pre-established music genres created by humans. To better and more honestly “collaborate” with machines, we must begin to move creative control away from ourselves and encourage machines to develop and exercise their own standards of beauty.
In this composition, I “co-wrote” a synthesizer piece with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building. I then ran the piece through a separate neural network that uses machine learning to “learn” the piece and generate its own variation of it. Repeating the process, the same neural network learns this variation, generates yet another variation, and so on. With each round, I cede more creative agency to the machine learning process as the variations deviate increasingly from the original.
—
At the center of both movements is interspecies cooperation—not just as a creative act, but also a biological imperative. We can learn from the altruism of animals who call out to warn each other of danger. Might we and artificial intelligence learn to do the same for each other?
Freddy Avis (Arswain)
Freddy Avis is a composer and musician based in Los Angeles. He worked under Emmy-nominated composer James S. Levine (Glee, American Horror Story, Nip Tuck) at Hans Zimmer's Remote Control Productions. Avis is credited on Why Women Kill, Tiger King, Shark Tank, and Dateline, among others. He contributed synth & percussion work on 8-time Oscar-nominated composer James Newton Howard's score for Disney's Jungle Cruise. Freddy earned his BA in Music and Political Science at Stanford University, where he pitched for the baseball team. In 2012 he was drafted by the Washington Nationals.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Necessitatibus nulla, at culpa animi aut facilis reiciendis voluptate ratione cupiditate qui perspiciatis, assumenda nostrum saepe deserunt quia veniam accusantium error suscipit!
