People

Bing Song

Bing Song

Senior Vice President, Berggruen Institute; Director, Berggruen China Center

Biography

Bing Song is Senior Vice President of the Berggruen Institute and Director of the Institute’s China Center. Prior to joining the Berggruen Institute, Ms. Song was a senior executive with Goldman Sachs China for over a decade, and prior to Goldman, an experienced capital markets lawyer for many years. Earlier in her career, Bing undertook academic and policy research and published in the areas of administrative law, competition law, and comparative procedural laws.

At the China Center, she has been leading projects under the research theme of Frontier Science, Technology, and Philosophy and edited two books Intelligence and Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence Meets Chinese Philosophers (CITIC Press 2020 and Springer 2021); and Out of Anthropocene: Philosophical Musings on the Relationship between Humanity and Nature (CITIC Press 2021)

Bing sits on the boards of Yuan Dian Contemporary Art Museum and Goldman Sachs (China) Securities Company Limited.


Articles

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