Berggruen Institute's Philosophy and Culture Center Workshop publications on Hierarchy & Equality

Nicolas Berggruen

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Two Cheers for Equality?

Mark Bevir

Democratic Governance: A Genealogy

Mathias Risse

Geisterkrieg: Nietzsche’s Two Conceptions of Justice

Carlos Fraenkel

Political Paternalism and the Problem of Autonomy: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives

Carlin Romano

Why Hire a Hierarchy? Dewey, Critics and Pragmatism

Stephen Macedo

Democratic and Legitimate Hierarchies

Michael Puett

Equality, Hierarchy and their Discontents: Theories from Classical China

Thaddeus Metz

A New Theory of Hierarchy: From Consent, Liberties, And Benefits To Relationship

Robin Wang

The Irony of Hierarchy and the Ideal of Equality

Joseph Chan

Democratic equality or Confucian hierarchy?

Yunxiang Yan

The Relational Person and Moralized Hierarchy in Chinese Culture

Stephen Angle

Vicious Oppression, Valuable Deference, and Provisional Hierarchy: A Contemporary Confucian Perspective

Justin Tiwald

Xunzi on Moral Expertise

Jiang Qian

Intuition and Cooperative Deliberation with Experts Human and Artificial

Taisu Zhang

Social Hierarchies and Customary Property Law in Pre-Industrial China and England

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