People

Ian Osborne

Ian Osborne

Biography

Ian Osborne advises political and business leaders on international affairs, and on all aspects of their reputation. The advisory firm which he founded, Osborne & Partners, acts for a select group of governments and corporations across the world. The firm’s clients include some of the world’s most admired leaders and philanthropists. From 2010 to 2012, Ian was concurrently a Partner at DST Global, a family of funds investing in Internet companies, that was established in 2009 and is one of the largest Internet investors in the world, with high profile successes including Alibaba, Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify and Twitter. Ian is a Member of the World Economic Forum; and together with Sean Parker and Marc Benioff, he is a co-founder and director of The Montagnard Group, a non-profit initiative that fosters philanthropic giving by the Internet and technology community. Ian is a Contributing Editor of The Spectator and GQ, and writes occasional columns for several newspapers. Ian was educated at St Paul’s School, King’s College London and the London School of Economics.

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