Darrell Steinberg

Former California Senate President pro Tempore

Biography

Darrell Steinberg is a shareholder in the Sacramento office and Chair of the California Government Law & Policy Practice. He provides strategic counsel to clients with matters involving state and local government.

Darrell Steinberg is one of the most respected political leaders in California, having most recently served as President Pro Tem of the State Senate from 2008 to 2014. His more than twenty-year career in public service also included six years in both the State Assembly and the Sacramento City Council. Over the course of his legislative tenure, Steinberg forged difficult agreements to usher the state from a $42 billion deficit to a surplus budget, implemented groundbreaking mental healthcare legislation, strengthened the state’s foster care system, improved K-12 education standards, reformed the statewide ballot initiative, and made historic investments in California’s water and transportation infrastructure.

Darrell is also the Founder and Board Chair of The Steinberg Institute for Advancing Mental Health Policy.


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