People

Brent Durbin

Brent Durbin

Associate Professor of Government; 2019-2020 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Brent Durbin is Associate Professor of Government at Smith College, where he teaches courses in U.S. foreign policy, international relations, strategic intelligence, and the politics of information. He is also co-director of the Bridging the Gap Project, which promotes connections between scholars and the broader foreign policy community. Along with three colleagues, Durbin will devote his Berggruen Fellowship to researching strategies for advancing liberal goals such as human rights, self-determination, and competition in world characterized by weak institutions and retreating liberal leadership. Durbin’s previous research centers on the political and organizational dynamics of U.S. national security, with a particular focus on the CIA. His book The CIA and the Politics of U.S. Intelligence Reform was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. With support from a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, Durbin is spending 2018-19 at UC Berkeley’s Information School and Center for Long-term Cybersecurity studying the social and political implications of Big Data.

 

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