People

Yukiko Uchida

Yukiko Uchida

Professor of Psychology; 2019-2020 Berggruen Fellow at CASBS

Biography

During her fellowship year, Yukiko Uchida plans to evaluate the current global ranking systems of well-being from a cultural psychological point of view. Special attention will be paid to how the current trend of market globalization changes local cultures, and consequently, the psychological functions of people in such cultures. Subsequently, she would like to examine how people understand and re-construct their psychological realities as a consequence of globalization.

Uchida is currently a professor of social and cultural psychology at Institute for the Future of Human Society, Kyoto University. Upon receiving her PhD in social psychology from Kyoto University in 2003, she started her academic career as a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. Since 2008, she has been based at the Kokoro Research Center. As a cultural psychologist, she studies the psychological mechanisms behind the experience of emotions like happiness. Her cross-cultural studies also examine how a participation in meaningful cultural practices fosters these psychological processes. Uchida is a 2019-20 Berggruen fellow at CASBS.

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