People

Terry S. Semel

Terry S. Semel

Chairman and CEO of Windsor Media

Biography

Terry S. Semel is the Chairman and CEO of  Windsor Media.   Previously, Semel served as the Chairman and  CEO of Yahoo! Inc. from 2001-2007.   Prior to Yahoo! Inc., Semel was  Chairman and Co-CEO of Warner Bros.  where, in two decades,  he and his partner,  Robert Daly,  built  Warner Bros. into one of the world’s largest and most creative media and entertainment enterprises.

Semel is Co-Chairman  of the  Board of Directors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , is on the Board of Trustees of The Paley Center for Media and  is a member of  the Chancellor’s Committee at UCLA.

The Semels have endowed the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior at UCLA, one of the largest and most distinguished institutes in the country engaged in the study of the brain and its disorders.

In 2005, Semel was granted the UCLA Medal, which is the highest honor bestowed by the University, and the Yale Legends in Leadership Award.

Semel holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Long Island University and an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Emerson College.

Semel was previously a member of Think Long California.

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