Little Bangladesh Creative Assembly

October 20, 2019

11am — Berggruen Institute – Los Angeles, CA

Little Bangladesh Creative Assembly: Sense LA has partnered with various organizations within the Little Bangladesh neighborhood of Los Angeles to host a creative assembly specific to the needs of the Bangladeshi community and residents of the area. The host organizations include Little Bangladesh Improvements, the Bangladeshi-American Society and Banglar Bijoy Bohor.

The assembly took place at the historic Bradbury Building on Sunday, October 20th from 11am – 5pm and was free and open to all.

Sense LA Community Plan:
Sense LA, together with the Korean-American Federation of Los Angeles (KAFLA), have convened all members of the Greater Wilshire area, organizations, clubs, associations and general residents to participate in a series of creative assemblies intended to bring people together to discuss, identify and create more nuanced comprehension of the issues that affect themselves, each other and their communities. Through our efforts, we anticipate the creation of a greater Wilshire recommendation document for the City of LA’s master plan. KAFLA has joined forces with the Berggruen Institute to use a leading-edge collaboration and creativity methodology developed at MIT to enable groups of people to understand problems of mutual interest and to connect to create a holistic vision for every subsection of greater Wilshire. This method of cooperation represents a marked shift in the way community input is gathered. It is also an unprecedented way of creating a deeper understanding of the individual members of various communities and how they feel about their environment.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

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. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a 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, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE