Pooja Reddy

Pooja Reddy

Economist, 2021-2022 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Pooja Reddy is currently a Vice President in J.P. Morgan’s investment banking division based in London. She previously worked at Citigroup and Morgan Stanley in their New York offices originating fixed income securities including asset-backed securitizations and public finance debt. She was a two-time delegate of New York City Council’s Participatory Budget Program developing proposals to strengthen the city’s transportation and cultural facilities. She also interned at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Economics & Policy in Washington, D.C. where she helped develop allocation strategies to target American Recovery & Reinvestment Act funds to states and communities in support of clean water projects, emissions reductions, brownfields development, and superfund cleanup sites. She is an Economics & Mathematics graduate of Columbia University, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Economics Review. She is deeply interested in the study of economic functions of government, and the intersection of political economy and capital markets.


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