Double bill
Adam Pultz Melbye: On the Learning of Parrots and Humans
The Spectral Parrot is a self-(de/re)tuning string instrument that uses machine learning to mimic to its sonic environment. In this performance, Adam Pultz—double bass player and creator of the Spectral Parrot—will perform alongside the Parrot in a dance of mutual learning and adaption between human and machine. In contrast to many other AI systems, the Parrot learns in real-time, allowing the audience and performer to experience how the instrument traces a slowly progressing arc through a vast space of microtonal timbres. During this journey, the initial goal of sonic mimicry gives way to a performative learning process in which successes and failures become reconfigured as creative potential.
The development of the Spectral Parrot was funded by Musikfond’s STIP-4 fellowship.
Sabine Vogel: Ch’íich
The Lol-ha Cenote is located in the center of the Mayan village of Yaxunah. It goes deep down, and the acoustics change and the everyday noises of the village sound like an echo from another world. It is quiet there, and it feels salutary and at the same time also a little bit eerie. I read somewhere that the ancient Maya believed cenotes were connected to the underworld. Someone told me that you symbolically die in a cenote and are then reborn again—like in a temazcal.
Shortly before I went to Mexico, my father passed away. During his last weeks, I read to him from his Mexico travel diary from the ’70s. For him it was memory; for me, it was preparation for the journey ahead. I also played for him every day on a ceramic flute modeled on old Mayan temple flutes. With this flute and the diary in my luggage, I flew to Yucatán and played the flute there in the ruins of the temple complex of Yaxunah and also for the people in the village.
The word ‘Chí’ich’’ was the first one I learned in Maya. It means “bird”(in German „Vogel“). Chí’ich ’is dedicated to my father. But it is also dedicated to the people of Yaxunah, their warm-heartedness, their laughter, their hospitality. It is dedicated to the dogs, the pigs, the birds, the landscape, the plants.
This was part of LEAM (Acoustic Ecology Lab Germany – Mexico), funded by IKF Goethe-Institut.
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