People

Sean Parker

Sean Parker

Founder & President, Parker Foundation

Biography

Sean Parker is a philanthropist and entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies. He is the President of The Parker Foundation which focuses on three areas: Life Sciences, Global Public Health and Civic Engagement. In April of this year, the Parker Foundation announced a $250 million grant to form the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Mr. Parker has been recognized for his leadership in funding and promoting research into the relationship between the immune system and cancer. Mr. Parker helped to establish the Stand Up 2 Cancer (SU2C) and Cancer Research Institute’s (CRI) Immunotherapy Dream Team. In 2013, he was honored by CRI with the Oliver R. Grace Award for Distinguished Service in Advancing Cancer Research. Mr. Parker was the co-founder of Napster at age 19 and Plaxo at 21. In 2004 he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to develop the online social network Facebook and served as Facebook’s founding president, and in 2007 he co-founded Causes on Facebook, which registered 180 million people to donate money and take action. In 2014, he announced his backing of a new initiative called Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. Mr. Parker is also chairman and founder of the Economic Innovation Group, based in Washington DC.

Parker was previously a member of the LA Committee.

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