People

Cindy Miscikowski

Cindy Miscikowski

Chair, The Ring Foundation

Biography

Cindy Miscikowski served for more than 35 years in the City of Los Angeles in the fields of land use, planning, and fiscal management. She was a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 1997 to 2005, where she spear-headed the adoption in 2005 of the new Master Plan for Los Angeles International Airport, which allowed modernization to move forward. From July, 2009 until September, 2013, she served as President of the L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners, and led the Port in achieving record air quality improvement while maintaining its status as the largest Port in the U.S. Since late 2009 Cindy has been the General and Managing Partner of The Ring Group, responsible for a real estate portfolio of multi-family properties consisting of over 2,600 units of apartments and boat slips in Marina del Rey and the Westside of Los Angeles. Additionally, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Music Center, Genesis L.A. – a non-profit economic development entity, and the UCLA Board of Visitors for the School of Art & Architecture. She is also the Chair of The Ring Foundation.

Miscikowski was previously a member of the LA Committee.

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