People

Ray Chambers

Ray Chambers

Ambassador to the World Health Organization for Global Strategy; Chairman of Wesray Social Investments LLC and Chairman of the MCJ Amelior Foundation

Biography

Most previously, Ray served as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Health in Agenda 2030 and for Malaria.

Ray Chambers is a philanthropist and humanitarian who has directed most of his efforts towards helping children.

He is the Founding Chairman of the Points of Light Foundation and co-founder, with Colin Powell, of America’s Promise – The Alliance for Youth. He also co-founded the National Mentoring Partnership.

Chambers is the co-founder of Malaria No More. He is the Founding Chairman of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and is the former Chairman of Wesray Capital Corporation, which he co-founded with William E. Simon. He is also the co-founder of the YES Network.

Ray Chambers was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

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