People

Zev Yaroslavsky

Zev Yaroslavsky

Director of the Los Angeles Initiative, University of California, Los Angeles

Biography

During a career in public life spanning nearly four decades, Zev Yaroslavsky has been at the forefront of Los Angeles County’s biggest issues, including transportation, the environment, health care, and cultural arts. He was first elected to office in 1975, winning the Los Angeles City Council’s coveted 5th District seat at the age of 26. In 1994, he was elected to the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing the Third District, the western part of the county and a constituency of two million people. Because of term limits, he retired from office in 2014. As a member of the Board of Supervisors, he quickly emerged as a leader on fiscal, health care, transportation, cultural and environmental matters. The county’s leader in the cultural arts, he championed efforts to rebuild and modernize the Hollywood Bowl and was instrumental in the development of Walt Disney Concert Hall. He has also funded major investments in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the San Fernando Valley Performing Arts Center. He has long been associated with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and he is now the Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Department of History, focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and history of the Los Angeles region. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he earned BA and MA degrees from UCLA.

Yaroslavsky was previously a member of the LA Committee.

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