People

Wang Hui

Wang Hui

Professor of Chinese Language, Literature, and History, Tsinghua University

Biography

Mr. Wang Hui is a professor in both the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the department of history, Director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

His research focuses on contemporary Chinese intellectual history and Chinese literature. He was the executive editor (with Huang Ping) of the influential magazine “Dushu” from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine «Foreign Policy« named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.

Prof. Wang Hui is the recipient of many awards (including “2013 Luca Pacioli Prize” which he shares with Jurgen Habermas)  for his scholarship and has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna (Italy), Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual meeting for the Association of Asian Scholars.

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