People

Weiming Tu

Weiming Tu

Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and Professor of Philosophy, Peking University

Biography

Dr. Tu Weiming is a Lifelong Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, and Research Professor and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Tu is a leading expert on Confucianism and Neo-confucianism. A proponent of the idea of “Cultural China,” which attempts to understand what it means to be Chinese within a world context, Dr. Tu is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community.

Professor Tu Weiming is the author of Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yangming’s Youth (1976), Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (1976, rev.1989), Humanity and Self-Cultivation (1979),Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (1985), Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (1993), Confucianism (2008), the Global Significance of Concrete Humanity: Essays on the Confucian Discourse in Cultural China (2010), Confucianism in the 21st Century (2014), etc.. His five-volume Anthology of Essays were published by Wuhan Press in 2011, eight-volume series of Collected Writingswere published by SDX Joint Publishing Company in 2013, and the entire Collected Worksbegan to be published by Peking University Press from 2013.

For his great contributions to humanity, Professor Tu Weiming was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988- ), an Executive Member of the Federation of International Philosophical Societies (FISP, 2008- ), and a Titular Member of the International Institute of Philosophy (IIP, 2010-, representing China).

He has been awarded honorary degrees from King’s College in London (UK), Lehigh University (US), Grand Valley (Michigan) State University (US), Soka University (Japan), Shandong University (China, the highest honor confirmed by the State Council of the PRC), Tunghai University (Taiwan), Lingnan University (Hong Kong), Macau University (Macau), etc. He is also the recipient of the Grand Prize of International T’oegye Society (Korea, 2001), the second Thomas Berry Award for Ecology and Religion (UN, 2002), Life Achievement Award by the American Humanist Society (US, 2007), the first Confucius Cultural Award (China, 2009), and the first Brilliance of China Award (China, 2013), Global Thinkers Forum “Prominence of Cultural Understanding” (Greece, 2013), China Cultural Figure (Macau, 2014) etc.

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