People

Maria Hummer-Tuttle

Maria Hummer-Tuttle

Chair of the Board of Trustees, The J. Paul Getty Trust

Biography

Maria Hummer-Tuttle, a lawyer, was a partner and Chair of the Management Committee and Co-Managing Partner of Manatt, Phelps and Phillips in Los Angeles. She was affiliated with the law firm for over 25 years. She currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and serves on the boards of Caltech, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies. Ms. Hummer-Tuttle is President of The Hummer Tuttle Foundation and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Getty Conservation Institute Council, the Caltech Space Innovation Council, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ms. Hummer-Tuttle has served on a number of charitable and civic boards including The Music Center of Los Angeles County, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Children’s Institute Inc., Mount St. Mary’s College and Scripps College, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Legal Aid Foundation and the Women’s Leadership Board of John F. Kennedy School of Government – Harvard University. Maria Hummer-Tuttle received her B.A. from Scripps College and her J.D. from UCLA School of Law.

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