People

Steve Pinedo

Steve Pinedo

COO at ExcelSense, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow.

Biography

Steve Pinedo serves as the chief operating officer at ExcelSense, an enterprise application software company where he is responsible for sales, marketing, services, and support. Prior to ExcelSense, Mr. Pinedo served in a variety of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing, product, customer adoption and success roles at BEA Systems, Oracle, Guidewire Software, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Steve is an expert in the methodologies for how enterprises successfully adopt and thrive using transformative SaaS technology. He has helped over 70 global firms successfully adopt SaaS delivery models and is a leading expert in the field of enterprise software computing and adoption. Earlier in his career, Steve served as a U.S. Navy officer and pilot. As a Berggruen Fellow, he will work with Yakov Feygin to write a white paper, tentatively titled “The National Security of our Compute infrastructure – Economy wide effects of an interruption in availability and the need to build and secure emergency capacity.“

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