People

Kathleen Miles

Kathleen Miles

Executive Editor

Biography

Kathleen Miles is the executive editor of Noema Magazine. She leads the team that launched Noema both online and in print in the spring of 2020. Based in Los Angeles, Noema is published by the Berggruen Institute.

Previously, as senior editor of The WorldPost, Miles led a team of editors in New York, working closely with Washington Post editors in DC, to publish daily op-eds, features and videos from around the world in The Washington Post. Earlier in New York, Miles worked as an editor and reporter for HuffPost, covering politics, business and the environment. Before HuffPost, she was a news producer on Patt Morrison’s daily public radio program at the NPR affiliate KPCC.

Prior to venturing into journalism, Miles was a district representative for Congressman Adam Schiff; English, History and Humanities teacher with Teach for America; field investigator at the National Labor Relations Board; and political action coordinator for the International Ironworkers during the Kerry presidential campaign. She studied international political economy at U.C. Berkeley and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. She can be reached on Twitter at @mileskathleen.

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