People

Michael Spence

Michael Spence

Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences; William R. Berkley Professor in Economics & Business, New York University

Biography

Michael Spence has served as the Chairman of an Independent Commission on Growth and Development, with a focus on growth in emerging economies (2006 to 2010). He is Professor of Economics in the Stern of Business at New York University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In 2001, Spence received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for work on markets with incomplete and asymmetric information. Mr. Spence serves on the boards of Genpact and Merca-dolibre, and a number of private companies. He is a member of the board of the Stanford Management Company, and the International Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation. He is a Senior Advisor to Oak Hill Investment Management and a consultant to PIMCO. Mr. Spence was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching and the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to economists under 40 years of age for a “significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” He served as dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999. From 1984 to 1990, Spence served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, overseeing Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Continuing Education. Mr. Spence earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Princeton summa cum laude and was selected for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was awarded a B.S.-M.A. from Oxford in mathematics and earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. He lives in Milan and New York with his wife and two younger children. He writes regularly on emerging market and global economy issues for leading publications and for Project Syndicate.

Spence was previously a member of the 21st Century Council, Council for the Future of Europe, and The WorldPost Advisory Council.

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