Misha Glenny

Misha Glenny

Journalist, Historian; 2019-2020 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Misha Glenny is a multiple award-winning British and Irish investigative journalist and historian who is currently working on the development of two television dramas and a stage play. A former BBC Central Europe Correspondent, Glenny covered the revolutions of 1989 and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His third book, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-2012, is a set text in many universities in the UK and North America. He was Executive Producer and Script Consultant on the TV drama series, McMafia, based on his eponymous non-fiction investigative book. Glenny is a regular keynote speaker on topics ranging from European history, geopolitics, organized crime, and cyber security. At the Berggruen Institute, he will be examining how we have striven in the past 500 years to adapt our environment to a human scale and how technology both threatens that almost congenital need for balance but yet may provide some solutions.


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