People

Jianhua Mei

Jianhua Mei

Professor of Philosophy; 2022-2023 Berggruen China Center Fellow

Biography

Professor Jianhua Mei graduated from Peking University with a Ph.D. in Analytical Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy. He is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy and Sociology, Shanxi University.

His research interests are philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence and experimental philosophy, metaphysics and pre-Qin philosophy. He is mainly concerned with a series of fundamental philosophical questions on how to understand consciousness, causality, self and reality in the context of contemporary science. He is committed to interdisciplinary and cross traditional philosophical research.

He sponsors the publication Human Cognition to understand cognition from different disciplines and cultures.

From 2022 to 2023, he will focus on the metaphysics of virtual reality, to understand reality from Eastern and Western metaphysics and virtual reality technology, and to provide a metaphysical basis for virtual reality.

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