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The Current Transcript for June 21, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

If you're weak, if you're really really pathetically weak the country is going to be overrun with millions of people. and if you're strong then you don't have any heart.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Even Donald Trump could not keep up his barrage of bluster over the forced separation of migrant families in the face of world condemnation. But as he backed down on a policy decried across nations as inhumane,he painted himself as misunderstood and caught in a dilemma. In fact his critics say they understand him far too well because they have seen this before, arguing that from the deliberate breakup of African-American families during slavery to the rounding up of Indigenous children across Canada for so many decades, separating parents and children is both political and deliberate. In just a moment we're asking about those uncomfortable parallels. Also today some say it's part of an ancient cultural practice inspired by love. U.S. Wildlife officials call it a crime.

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They are used for love. The hummingbird is a bird. It is the bird that opens the channels so that people like them.

AMT: In an hour we bring you the story of a forensic ornithologist on the trail of smugglers who trade in the tiny intricately wrapped bodies of hummingbirds. Meet Mr. Pepper Trail as he tracks the mystery of La Chuparosa son and she has chosen a musical collaborator with the precision of a robot.

SOUNDCLIP

When I found the first few pieces of software that could actually write music using code I got really excited because I thought now finally someone like me, who doesn't play instruments, can potentially make the music that I hear in my head with this new collaboration partner.

AMT: Taryn Southern's release of an album created with A.I. raises all sorts of questions about our human claim over creativity. Listen if you dare. In half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Rhetoric around migrants in U.S. has parallels to slavery, says historian

Guests: John Moore, Nikki Taylor, Nakuset

SOUNDCLIP

Thank you very much. We are signing an executive order. It's about keeping families together. So we're going to have strong very strong borders but we're going to keep the families together. I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.

AMT: Well with an executive order pledging to quote "detain alien families together", the U.S. president Donald Trump moved to quell some of the outrage yesterday. The backlash has been bipartisan and international as images of migrant children separated from their parents and housed in detention centers have circulated far and wide, including one particularly powerful image of a little girl in a red shirt apprehended by border agents and crying as her mother is searched. My first guest is the photojournalist behind that picture. John Moore is a special correspondent for Getty Images. He's been documenting the border issue for a decade. He's compiled his work in the book Undocumented Immigration and the Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border. And we have reached him in Stanford Connecticut. Hello John Moore.

JOHN MOORE: Good morning. Good to speak with you.

AMT: Let's start with yesterday's executive order from Donald Trump what can you tell us about how that will change things?

JOHN MOORE: Well this executive order appears to only partially roll back some of his zero tolerance policy. I think the government intends to continue detaining families, just not separately from their kids. So in the past, for instance during the Obama administration and earlier in the Trump administration, families would be processed and then they would be released and given a future court date to appear in front of a immigration judge. Now apparently they will be processed and then held in detention centers. And so I think that's all very much a work in progress. And we'll see how this shakes out in the next few days.

AMT: And of course so many children have already been separated from their parents. Immigration lawyers have raised concerns about the challenge of trying to reunite some of them. Any sense of how that can happen?

JOHN MOORE: We have absolutely no sense of that just yet. It's still too early. They have a whole chaotic mess to deal with when it comes to families that have already been separated. And that's going to be a big challenge.

AMT: Well let's talk about your photo. It prompted some of the outrage we have been talking about. Can you describe for us the situation you encountered in the lead up to that photograph?

JOHN MOORE: I had been photographing Border Patrol agents as they worked in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, which is in far southern Texas right along the Mexican border. And there is where many thousands of asylum seekers crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the U.S. on rafts, often in the middle of the night. And so I spent a day with them this last week. People were coming across during the day and I photographed them in that situation. Some of them running from Border Patrol agents and others turning themselves in for asylum. And that night I observed as numerous rafts came across with groups of asylum seekers. And when they came together on the U.S. side the border patrol came upon them with spotlights and began to put them all together and talked with them about where they came from, see their identifications. Everyone when they're turning themselves in they have to remove all of their personal effects whether it be wallets or jewelry or pens or backpacks even their shoelaces, and they put those things into individual homeland security bags which will be eventually returned to them either on release or deportation. In this case I was able to see a mother and her young child. She was breastfeeding her for a while. After some time when it was appropriate I came up and talked with her briefly. And she had come from Honduras and brought this little girl over the course of a month which is a very long and difficult journey. And so I talked with them briefly before continuing to photograph.

AMT: There's a photograph here. She's holding her but at one point she has to put her down because she's being searched. And what happens?

JOHN MOORE: Well the officer who went to search the mother told her that she did have to put the child down and the mother had been holding this girl for a long time. And clearly the little girl did not want to get down and when she set her on the ground is when she started crying inconsolably. It was very hard to see, to witness. And I took a few steps to the side. As a photojournalist, I knew I had very little time to tell this cute story and so I took a knee and tried to get on the little girl's level and photographed her looking up, first looking down and then looking around and a confused and sad way in a meltdown stage, and then looking up at her at her mother for some sort of comfort. Her mom had her hand spread on the transport vehicle as she was patted down and she stared ahead stoically clearly just trying to push through this this ordeal.

AMT: And what and what's going through your mind? I know you're focused through that lens but what else is going through your mind?

JOHN MOORE: Well I'm a father myself. I've got three children and one of them is a toddler and so on very familiar with the whole concept of separation anxiety. Many children have it early in life even when they're living in the best of circumstances. So after a month under the hot sun potentially riding upon train tops called the beast to finally reach this destination to turn themselves in to receive political asylum and then two and then to be in this situation facing family separation. I'm sure was a very traumatic moment for that child. That child didn't know she'd be back with their mother in 10 seconds or in ten days. In that moment they only see that moment. And I hope they're still together.

AMT: We don't know, huh?

JOHN MOORE: We don't know for sure. I haven't received confirmation on that. The government has not been forthcoming but I hope to find out in the coming days it's something that's always on my mind.

AMT: Why is it that an image such as that has such a big impact on public opinion?

JOHN MOORE: Well certainly the suffering of children it touches any adult is it. It's almost visceral. When when you look at this picture, when I even look at this picture a week later, it makes me feel. And you know as you mentioned I had been doing this coverage for 10 years. I photographed many many different parts of this story for Getty Images all along the U.S. border in Central America and Mexico and all within the United States as well. And I found in my material, over the course of 10 years, that the pictures that people remember and the ones that are touched by are the ones that make them feel, and this little child seems to have done that.

AMT: It certainly has. John Moore, thank you. Thank you for your work.

JOHN MOORE: Thank you.

JOHN MOORE: John Moore is a photojournalist special correspondent with Getty Images and author of undocumented immigration and the militarization of the United States Mexico border. He's in Stamford Connecticut today. The migrant families separated at the southern U.S. border caught the world's attention this week. But it is hardly an historical first. There are other painful episodes such as Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, Canada's residential schools and the entire era of slavery. Nikki Taylor chairs the Department of History at Howard University. She's the author most recently of driven toward madness the fugitive slave Margaret Garner. And tragedy on the Ohio Nikki Taylor is in Washington D.C. Hello.

NIKKI TAYLOR: Hi how are you. Good morning.

AMT: When you see images like the one taken by John Moore of kids held in detention centers or standing watching, the little girl watching her mom being searched and crying, what historical images come to mind for you?

NIKKI TAYLOR: The exact historical image that came to my mind about- as soon as this story broke, was the slave auction and how African-Americans were held in what was termed slave pens which were holding facilities while they awaited the auction. And so that forced separation of those families brought with it all manner of horrific trauma, psychological trauma, to the children and to the parents because there was no idea on the behalf both parties of if or when they would ever be reconnected.

AMT: What was the purpose of breaking up the family unit during slavery?

NIKKI TAYLOR: The purpose. Well number one impetus was profit, to sell the parents you know to distant regions for profit, especially as slavery became less profitable in the eastern seaboard. Another reason; many enslaved people were separated from their families by cell was as a punishment for recalcitrance or punishment for disobedience or any other form of resistance. And so the resisting enslaved person would be sold away from his or her family as a punishment. And in the same vein the selling of that person could be a deterrent to others not to resist.

AMT: And how did these separations impact the enslaved women, in particular the mothers?

NIKKI TAYLOR: Well it was horrific to watch children that you had given birth to be sold away from you never to be seen again. This was damaging. The woman that was the subject of my latest [unintelligible] that may have been one of the things that drove her and her family to escape slavery was the fear of one of her family members being sold away and not even been herself. And so that that drove people to all kinds of desperate responses at times. Even the thought of being separated from their loved ones.

AMT: Do you see a parallel between the language we hear today coming out of the Trump administration the White House in reference to migrants and how the government would refer to enslaved African-Americans in the 19th century?

NIKKI TAYLOR: Not so much the government's reference but individual slaveholders reference an individual anti-black people's reference. One of the parallels that comes to mind in terms of the rhetoric is in 1830s and 40s in urban centers in the north, as fugitive slaves escaped and try to make their way to these northern cities and particular cities like New York Philadelphia Cincinnati, there was a level of hysteria among the whites in those cities. And they talked about the Africanization of the city and how these immigrants will bring crime and they would bring disease and they were essentially criminalizing people who simply wanted to be free. And so I see the same parallels with the migrants and how Trump and his administration, the discourse that they've created, whereby refugees have been criminalized. I think it's adorn and unconscionable.

AMT: So you're connecting the dots. You're saying that that the separation of children from their parents is deliberate and political as a way to control people.

NIKKI TAYLOR: Well I am not saying that per se I'm just giving you historical examples of the rhetoric that you know African-American history. But yes personally I do think it's deliberate and political and designed to deter people from seeking the U.S. as that beacon of liberty that it always has been.

AMT: Okay, Nikki Taylor thank you for your time today.

NIKKI TAYLOR: Thank you so much.

AMT: Nikki Taylor chair of the Department of History at Howard University. She joined us from Washington D.C. Well what's been happening to migrant children in America is resonating with many indigenous people here in Canada, from residential schools to the Sixties Scoop to the current overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the foster care system. My next guest says we cannot ignore the parallels especially with news coming out of Quebec today. Nakuset said is the executive director of the Native Women's Shelter in Montreal and a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. She joins us from our Montreal studio. Hello.

NAKUSET: Hi. Happy Aboriginal Day.

AMT: Oh well thank you. And to you. As someone who has been through the experience of being separated from your own family, what have you been thinking watching the coverage of these children detained on the Mexico US border?

NAKUSET: I think that this is history repeating itself. I was watching something this morning on the news and they showed a cage of people and it reminded me of how the government forced us onto reservations. So that was our cage. We weren't allowed to leave the reservations. We had authorities, Indian agents that would watch over us and make sure we did not leave. And this is what is currently happening now in the States.

AMT: Can you tell us a bit about your own experience?

NAKUSET: Well I'm part of the Sixties Scoop. So that was a government initiative to assimilate indigenous children into white families through adoption. And I was photographed and put into a program called AIM, Adopt an Indian or Metis program. And basically they took a picture of me when I was living in Thomson Manitoba, when I was about three years old and I was kind of cute, like adoptable, and sent it over to Montreal to Jewish Family Services and my parents had a huge catalogue of only indigenous children and they chose my picture and I was suddenly taken away. And the thing is that my sister was in foster care with me so she woke up to me being gone. And that changed her life because she was six time and she spent the rest of her life looking for me. It deeply impacted her, deeply impacted me. I was you know 20000 of us. This is what happened to the Sixties Scoop.

AMT: And that you see what's going on now through the prism of that. I want to ask you very specifically about some something in the news right now. Quebec had had a policy of when children were medevacked out of northern communities that their parents were not allowed to go with them, or even one parent and they agreed to change that policy. But now the Health Minister Gaetan Barrette has angered indigenous leaders because of what he has said. He has said that parents in remote northern villages could still be barred from accompanying a child on a medevac flight because, and I'm quoting here, "because no one agitated drugged or under whatever influence would get on the plane at any cost. That will not happen and that happens all the time". How do you respond to that?

NAKUSET: My goodness. It is absolutely disgusting that he could say such a thing as someone who's in a leadership position that is painting the people as drunks. And this is what currently people think about indigenous people and Inuit. I work in Montreal. We are working so hard with the population and working with different levels of you know government youth protection to try to change that perception. There are people in Montreal that will rent to the Inuit because they think they're all drunks and that is not true. So for him to say that, he is solidifying that thought and that is really really damaging. And I think everyone should be outraged not just Indigenous people. How dare you? How can you paint a picture of a whole population? And do you understand the history of the Inuit and you know what the government did to the people? They struggle. I mean indigenous people we all struggle but that is not helping us. And he should he should apologize. He should step down. He should be a people to his behaviour.

AMT: You know this incident with the Quebec minister is playing out against world outrage on what's going on in the United States with the way children are taken. What do Canadians need to think about as we watch that unfold?

NAKUSET: Are you referring to The States?

AMT: Well yeah. So we've got this going on here but everybody's been focused on the states. What do we need to remember about what's going on in our own backyard?

NAKUSET: Well, exactly. The idea that you know when the Inuit population is in crisis and they have to take this air ambulance and they have to leave their children, the child is flown over here to Montreal. Sometimes they don't make it and they're not with their family, or they get to the hospital and they cry and they're crying and they're speaking in their own language and they have to get an interpreter and the interpreters like 'why is this child crying?' 'Well I want my mommy.' And this has been going on for decades. It's only now that because of media that there's going to be a change. But I think we need to keep pushing that change and this Mr. Barrette needs to be accountable to his behavior and a huge apology and he- my goodness.

AMT: Well, Nakuset, thank you for speaking with me today.

NAKUSET: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Nakuset is the executive director of the Native Women's Shelter in Montreal. She's a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. She joined us in our Montreal studio. Let us know what you think of the point that our guests are making today. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. The CBC News is next. And then: She's a singer she's a technologist. Taryn Southern has just done something no musician has done before. She's released an album composed with artificial intelligence. Is it still music if it's written by a robot? Will let you listen and decide. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

[Music: Theme]

This pop artist's new album is the first to use artificial intelligence

Guests: Taryn Southern, Steve Engels

[clip] [/clip]

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Still to come: They call him the Sherlock Holmes of bird crime. Forensic ornithologist Pepper Trail will join me to talk about a curious case that's been haunting him, why are dead hummingbirds showing up for sale? And what does the market for them have to do with the tiny birds plummeting population across the continent? But first an algorithm with rhythm.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song]

I wish could touch beyond what I can touch. I wish I could fail beyond what is in trail. I wish I could imagine...

AMT: That's the American pop singer Taryn Southern. The song Break Free is from her new album and it features a collaborator the likes of which the music world has never heard before. The album is called I Am A.I.

[Music]

AMT: This is being hailed as the first pop album to be fully composed by artificial intelligence and it may have you wondering how artificial intelligence can sound so genuine. After all our capacity to create music has long been considered one of those uniquely human things. Beethoven called Music the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents. Centuries later Billy Joel called it an explosive expression of humanity. But now artificial intelligence is challenging that, creating music that sometimes indistinguishable from music created by humans.

[Music]

AMT: The human we heard singing there, Taryn Southern is joining us now from New York City.

TARYN SOUTHERN: Hi thank you for having me. Hi.

AMT: So how does the music making process work with A.I.?

TARYN SOUTHERN: The easiest way to explain it to someone is to compare the process to directing a film or editing a film in the sense that it's my job to give the A.I. direction in the form of parameters like beats per minute, genre, style, things like that. And that might be injecting certain types of data into the system for it to learn from. And then ones that fit a piece of music back at me I can rearrange it in a form that I see fit.

AMT: When you do something like that, is the copyright yours? Do you have to share it with the programs that have been put in there?

TARYN SOUTHERN: Those are all things that we definitely need to figure out as we move forward with this technology. A lot of the technologies are so new on the scene that there are no rules. I mean in the case of [unintelligible] for instance, it's open source, free software that anyone can download and get- in the case of working with a software like that the copyright lies in the music producer in this case. That would be me. But of course all of these companies are going to differ depending on what their own need are. And so these are conversations that we all need to have. And as more artists use these kinds of technologies we need to figure out what exactly belongs to whom.

AMT: How well did you find these programs generated music that match your creative vision?

TARYN SOUTHERN: That's a great question. You know there are certainly challenges. It's an early time in the world of A.I. music. I was surprised when I started this project at how good the software was. I think that their ability, even in the last year of working with these programs, has improved. In some cases the limitations are actually a fun creative box that you're forced to work within that allow you to do things that are maybe outside the realm of what you would do traditionally, using you know your own personal taste preferences.

AMT: Let's talk about tradition and the people stuff. How does that compare to making music the traditional way with musicians?

TARYN SOUTHERN: So for me I'm not a skilled musician. I've had two albums prior and produced a lot of music. And every time I release a song I have to work with someone in order to get that out to the world; a music producer or an instrumentalist because my skills just are pretty rudimentary, actually very basic piano and it would be embarrassing to say that. I'm a good pianist. But in some ways it's kind of funny the similarities too. When I work with music producers who've been in the business for a long time, a lot of them will tell you that there's a formula to what they do. If you think about someone like Max Martin for instance who's had tons of number one hits in the pop world, I basically think of him as an advanced A.I. and he has an ear. He knows exactly what works. There's a structure to what he does and in working with top music producers or songwriters and I've done very little of that just because it's hard to get access to those people. But there is a formula to how they go about writing and how they go about thinking about music. It's almost a mathematical equation. And so in some ways working with the A.I. has forced me to create a new language around how I think about song writing and each AI has a different language.

AMT: How much does it cost to make an album this way compared to the traditional way?

TARYN SOUTHERN: I'll tell you it's a lot more affordable. I grew up in Wichita Kansas which is not exactly the music capital of the world. So when I was in high school making my first album I had to bribe a bunch of kids in band class with Blockbuster certificates to get it made. And it was hard it took me two years and they almost didn't finish it. And so I think that there is something promising about tools that allow for children who don't have access to this kind of nice recording studio or you know expensive producers to be able to at least cut their chops, to develop an ear, to play around and see what's working and what's not working in their song writing with tools like these.

AMT: Computers don't need bribes.

TARYN SOUTHERN: Not yet anyway. We don't know. That could change.

AMT: But it sounds like you have another level of autonomy when you're dealing with A.I. as well.

TARYN SOUTHERN: There are less obstacles and if you don't like something you can simply put it in the trash and start again. There's no limitation to how long you spend on a song or how many times you have to go back. And the A.I. is not going to complain about going over the eight hour time limit. So I mean as an artist that has had to be scrappy my entire career and I really kind of grew up in the YouTube generation and doing everything myself and learning how to do everything myself, I think that there is something really compelling about that.

AMT: So after creating this album what do you think? Can computers be as creative as humans?

TARYN SOUTHERN: Honestly I think that all depends on the listener. Right. We've seen studies of people who have listened to music by A.I. or See two dimensional generative art from A.I. and felt that it was just as emotional until they're told that it's A.I. that created it. So it seems that in some cases humans have a bias towards other humans.

AMT: How do you think is going to change music?

TARYN SOUTHERN: I don't think that the big fear narrative is super helpful or even accurate in this case. I'm sure that although there were a lot of fears that abound when hip hop started using samples, I mean it's really built on the backbone of sampling electronic music. And yet these things still became their own genres and really grew and it evolved into their own thing. And I see A.I. as being a similar tool that certain artists use, other artists don't use. I see it as a complimentary tool that we see people stretching up out of their creative zone and working with disparate types of A.I. neural networks to point out patterns that we don't regularly see in music, maybe new sounds that we are not accustomed to hearing. that's really exciting to me.

AMT: And some people didn't like electric guitars either.

TARYN SOUTHERN: That's right. That's right. It's almost like our ears just it takes time us to get accustomed to new sounds.

AMT: Should Musicians be scared for their jobs then?

TARYN SOUTHERN: No I think- I joked when I say this but I suppose it's a little bit serious. I think bad musicians should be a little scared. Just because I think that this tool just makes it easier for people to get in the game just as YouTube made it easier for content creators and filmmakers who didn't live in Hollywood or New York City to also get in. And I think that would be the challenge that maybe some musicians or songwriter feel in this evolution. And I think we will feel the pinch everywhere across all industries.

AMT: What about live music? If A.I. is increasingly the composer, or the code composer, how would that change the nature of live performance?

TARYN SOUTHERN: Well I mean [unintelligible] for instance that analyzes orchestral pieces, they have done live performances with their A.I. pieces with human orchestra human players playing A.I. compose music. I would love to do a tour with robots and have humans playing instruments together just because I think that would be cool. But I'd imagine that for the most part I would be used as a compositional tool. And in terms of live performances we would still have humans playing those instruments. There is something about the lack of perfection of human performance that is emotional experience in music.

AMT: So if you win a Grammy for IMAI who do you share the trophy with?

TARYN SOUTHERN: Good question. I suppose my A.I. friend. My little digital friend. I mean I couldn't do it without them. It's a really good question that would be quite a funny thing. Who do I bring up onstage with me?

AMT: Well you know now I want you to win so that we can figure that out and we can watch what happens.

TARYN SOUTHERN: We can figure it out together. Yeah we just like build a really terrible robot to represent the A.I.

AMT: Taryn it's good to talk to you. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

TARYN SOUTHERN: Thank you as well.

AMT: Taryn Southern is a singer. Her new album is called I Am A.I. We reached her in New York City. To listen to more of her song Break Free head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. So here's a little experiment I'm going to play two pieces of music for you. One is composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. The other is not. It is created by artificial intelligence. Here is the first:

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

AMT: And now here is the second piece of music.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

AMT: Do you know which is which? I'm joined now by the man behind this experiment. Steve Engels is an associate professor of teaching in the computer science department of the University of Toronto and he's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi welcome.

STEVE ENGELS: Hi. Thanks For having me.

AMT: I'm not sure I know. I'm not sure what I should be listening for.

STEVE ENGELS: There's just little things. I mean the reason why we chose Bach is because Bach has a very structured way of playing. When we first started we were just creating music original music that we were training off of human composers. And we were trying to think of something where since it's a computer program we wanted something that was very regular, very structured. The more variation you get the harder it is to make something that kind of imitates the original. And Bach is is if anything else you know structured, almost mathematical. And so when you listen to it there's some ways where you can hear varying in ways that seem a little bit off from each other, like where the sequences of notes kind of play one way at one moment and another way another. And that's the only way you can really tell. Otherwise it tries to obey all the different rules that Bach had when it came to playing music.

AMT: So which is it?

STEVE ENGELS: The second one I believe is the the artificially generated one.

AMT: Okay. That was my thought was my feeling. But you know I'm not as musically proficient as you so I was I was nervous. So can we play them again? Let's play Bach.

STEVE ENGELS: Okay.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

AMT: Okay. And the A.I.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

AMT: Steve Engels the A.I. sounds almost a little more complicated.

STEVE ENGELS: A little bit. It's actually combining different pieces by Bach into a single piece. The idea being that Bach while there's variations from one piece to another has kind of an overarching style. And so it tries to imitate not just a single piece of style but all of them.

AMT: So tell us more about what you're actually working on.

STEVE ENGELS: So this music generator project, it's basically trying to take original pieces and generate new music that imitates their style. The start of it was actually we were working with the videogame community and Toronto is I got a really vibrant independent game community. But you know as a result there's not a lot of people who can afford composers. So we thought we would make an artificial composer. Give me a piece whose style you want to imitate. We'll look at it, analyze the patterns within that piece and then generate original music that follows those patterns. Beginning it played like a distracted jazz pianist. It was basically musical but didn't have any large scale direction. And since then we've been working at figuring out like how does music work on a higher level.

AMT: So why are you researching A.I. in music?

STEVE ENGELS: Actually so AI was my background. I was fascinated with the idea of creating software that could imitate things that humans do. But it was because of some of the students who approached me that said 'I've got a musical background. I love to find some ways of combining music in A.I.' And so we thought well I'd been working on creating speeches you know text automatically why don't we try it with music.

AMT: And talk to me a little bit more than about these tests that have been set for AI that AI keeps beating.

STEVE ENGELS: I guess you can think there's two different levels. There's the main one that A.I. considers which is called the Turing Test. And the Turing test is supposed to say if you couldn't see, like there's a human and a computer and they were both doing a certain task, would you be able to tell which ones are human which ones a computer. If their abilities are about the same then they're indistinguishable. And as far as you're concerned, that thing, the computer is intelligent enough at least to pass for a regular human. The second test is kind of a little more onerous in things like chess. For a chess software, chess playing robot to be able to do well it has to actually be like the World Champion. So it has to be every human.

AMT: But it did do that. Well it beat Kasparov.

STEVE ENGELS: It beat Kasparov, yes. You know that was considered to be a world champion-ish at the time so why not, beat the best player and go checkers. So all these different games. So when it comes to this as you saw there 25 percent of the people couldn't identify which was switch be good enough to be able to say well it can generate original music, at least as good as like 95 percent of us.

AMT: So is that how you feel? Is A.I. able to make music that is as good as human made music?

STEVE ENGELS: I think that we are not going to create the next Bach but it is certainly better than anything that I could do, certainly better than anything about 90 percent of us can do.

AMT: Because 90 percent of us don't compose.

STEVE ENGELS: Right. And so is it better than or as good as humans. Sure. Is it as good as the best human? Well probably not.

AMT: And I guess you just keep experimenting to see right.

STEVE ENGELS: I'm working on it.

AMT: But if humans are the ones programming the computers how does the computer become superior to that?

STEVE ENGELS: We actually come up with not as much rules for how it's supposed to work but rules for how it's supposed to learn. So we say look here's a lot of different pieces. You figure out what the patterns are. And once you figure out what the patterns are then try to generate something that follows those patterns. And so this ability to look at data unfettered by our own biases is what causes computers to have the ability to see things beyond what humans can see.

AMT: I would like to hear another opinion. Andrew Stewart is a Canadian composer and an associate professor of music in Digital Audio Arts at the University of Lethbridge.

SOUNDCLIP

I don't believe that computers are making music you know. These are all systems that you know go into giving us the impression that the technology is somehow operating on its own and that the technology is somehow creative. And so to think of a computer actually making music is false, in my opinion, just as it is false to really believe that artificial intelligence is a thing, it's real. It's not real.

AMT: What do you say to that?

STEVE ENGELS: I mean it is difficult. I mean things like music especially has always been something very human creation. I mean no one has any problems with computers being good at saying things like finding directions on Google Maps. We understand that there's limitations that humans have in terms of holding a huge amount of data and being able to figure out things on the fly. But when it comes to things like music and art, yes, those are considered to be almost personal. And he's right in that's at this point we are imitating. The whole idea of what A.I. is supposed to do is suppose to take tasks that humans do and try to do them as well as humans if not better.

AMT: So do you think computers can be creative?

STEVE ENGELS: Hard to say. I don't know if humans are creative sometimes. I mean it's the idea of creativity is something, well and I've studied is getting inventions or innovations. A lot of things that we create that are new are really inspired by things that we've seen before. Very few people who come up with something completely original in a vacuum. And so we find ways of combining and recombining things we've seen before and we do it in new and innovative ways. So we try to draw from that in order to come up with something that models human creativity. But I don't know. I mean I sometimes think the more we dug into this to try to figure out whether our A.Is are being truly creative the more we are questioning whether any of us are actually creative.

AMT: It's a good question. We did ask Andrew Stewart about A.I.'s creativity. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

As a composer and creating a piece of music. I'm choosing a particular path that means I don't know that say I'm working in a specific key or I'm working with a certain type of instrument or instrumentation. All of these things I think for the human are quite intimate to the creator. They know their instruments very very well. They know not only what the instruments can do well, they know what the instruments can't do well and how they feel. And so all of this I think is unique to the human act of creation.

AMT: Okay so composers and musicians make choices. How can an algorithm match the intimacy that he's talking about there?

STEVE ENGELS: To a certain degree he's right. There's a limitation especially of the software creating nothing about A.I. in general, but just what we're making. We're making something that is purely imitating based on previous things that it sees. If there is a particular sequence of notes that doesn't exist in the training, it's not going to exist in anything we generate. And so that's kind of how we keep these things musical because we know if humans consider this musical, then as long as we stay within the boundaries of what this human created we will be musical as well. But we never make anything that's musical outside of these boundaries. For that we need to train off of more and more music, all music that's ever been made in the world, in order to make something that at least matches the rules or standards that humans have seen that would never make something that hasn't been seen before.

AMT: And of course music is very emotive and I'm guessing composers would argue that they put that emotion into their compositions. So where does the emotion come in with A.I.?

STEVE ENGELS: We're still working on that part. That's kind of the next stage.

AMT: And I guess in a way a composer doesn't control that either. The listener can control some of that.

STEVE ENGELS: All the stuff is all drawn from humans in the end. It's human generated music. We've got humans as our way of determining whether we're doing a good job or bad job and how to correct things. And when it comes to emotions, yes, we're going to be looking at what kind of emotions do humans feel with a certain type of music to figure out how to generate that same type again.

AMT: I can see by the look on your face that this is really exciting stuff.

STEVE ENGELS: It's exciting because it's so- I don't know how it's all going to go. I don't know how it ends. I know there's a huge amount of potential for A.I. And the terms of the things that we can make with, in terms of things that are doing these days, I think that by saying that computers are capable of certain things it's almost throwing down the gauntlet and issuing the challenge to people to make it happen. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how or if we’re going to be hitting these targets in like a year or two years or five or next month. It all just kind of happens one day. It wasn't working one day. If something works another and suddenly we've made another leap forward.

AMT: So in the field of A.I. how important is the question of whether a computer can be created?

STEVE ENGELS: It is something new. Most we've been trying to do tasks, cognitive tasks, that people need doing around the world; maps, data processing. But creativity has always been something where it doesn't solve a human problem. It's just- it's an exploration of what it means to be intelligent. And yes, I'm I'm trying to figure out like where is it going to go or who else is going to start working on this and what the state of the art is going to be. I don't think I'm going to be the one who's going to push ahead. I think I'm going to be the one that shows people as possible and then other people are going to jump in and make strides beyond me.

AMT: Fascinating stuff. Thanks for coming in.

STEVE ENGELS: No problem. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Steve Engels is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. With me in our Toronto studio. Over to you now. Do you think computers will be able to create music as well as humans or is the ability to be creative uniquely human? Head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link and let us know what you think. And while you are there you can also listen to two pieces of music again, the real Bach and the eight I generated Bach. Stay with us in our next half hour. Looking out for some tiny but mighty birds. Forensic ornithologist Pepper Trail is on the fight to save hummingbird's. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

Why are dead hummingbirds showing up for sale? Investigating the illicit love charm trade

Guest: Pepper Trail

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

So this is a bird in the trap and we use this hummingbird de-elevation device. So here on Grouse we have our hummingbird feeders about ten feet off the ground on poles and the reason for that is we have lots of local black bears that would love to eat the sugar water as well. So when we do catch a bird we have to use this hook on a stick to lower the trap down, take the bird out of the trap and then we put the trap and the feeder back up top.

AMT: Devin Manky is the wildlife manager for the gross mountain refuge for endangered wildlife in North Vancouver. As part of his job he monitors hummingbirds over the summer months.

SOUNDCLIP

DEVIN MANKY: As you can see when we take the bird out of the trap I just gently close my hand around it and prevent them from flying away. And then we have a special way of holding them. That's kind of like holding a pencil. You put a finger on each wing so that again they don't injure the wing. They don't get their wings out. So it's a safe way to carry them.

AMT: He is carrying that delicate bird to his workstation so he can take some measurements, observe and put an identifying band on it. It is part of a North American program to learn about hummingbirds; their migration, their breeding patterns and the health of the population. Our producer Jessica Linzey went with Devin Manky to learn more.

SOUNDCLIP

DEVIN MANKY: We've had a good morning so far. We've caught 13 birds so far and we have number 14 and 15 here waiting for their bands. We put them in these little hummingbird straight jackets, we call them, are a little hummingbird blankets that just prevent them from injuring their wings while we were bending them. So the reason we're banning them is because the populations of Rufous hummingbird seems to be declining, and there's no concentrated study except for the one we're participating in to look at numbers and what they're doing year to year, to see if it's a natural trend or if there's a definite decline and we have to take some serious conservation steps to make sure that we don't lose our hummingbird's. So the first thing we do is put the band on her here and we have this little leg gauge. So all the different sizes for all these different species of hummingbird and we have these little bands here in wax that we've pre-prepared. So this is three different sizes. Believe it or not.

JESSICA LINZEY: [Laughs] I was going to say three different sizes but those are so tiny.

DEVIN MANKY: Yes. So then we carefully get her leg up and we put the band on. It's a bit of a scale of banded probably, several thousand hummingbirds of this... So our bands on. We take measurements. We measure their build, their wing. We look at things like if they have pollen on their body which would tell us about what resources they are using, what flowers they are feeding on. We do things like we count the little throat feathers, the iridescent throat feathers because it's quite individual how many they have. This girl here just has maybe about one two three four five six seven eight nine. So she's got nine sparkly feathers. We write that down on her.

JESSICA LINZEY: How do you see those individual feathers?

DEVIN MANKY: Four five six seven eight nine. Years of practice just having a handle handled and worked with many many birds over the years. So this is actually interesting. So her abdomen is swollen which means she's in the process of egg making and egg laying. So it's a sign that she's breeding probably right here up on Grouse mountain before we release her we give her a little bit of sugar water. She's under CDC. Her throat going up and down there. She's having a a good drink. Last step that we do is just we put them on a scale and we weigh them and she's four point one. So that's all the other birds were weighing this morning, for example, were three point three, three point four grams and she's four point one. So she's got something else going on inside. So now we're going to release her.

[Sound: Hummingbird flies off]

AMT: Well that was fast. Let's hear her fly off again.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Humming bird flies off]

AMT: Okay there you go. The sound of a hummingbird flying away. As optimistic as Devin Manky may feel setting free a hummingbird a boat to lay an egg, he knows the challenges that bird faces. Hummingbird populations are in decline all over the world. Researchers point to a number of reasons for that; climate change, loss of habitat, rapid urbanization in areas where the hummingbirds breed and then there's the human appetite for love. That's right. In 2013 a box of dead hummingbird eggs turned up at a lab belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Special agents with the service had been trying to crack an unusual case a black market trade in hummingbird love charms. To do that they needed the help of a man who's been called the Sherlock Holmes of bird crime. His name is Pepper Trail. He is a forensic ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For five years he's been at the heart of the ongoing investigation into the trade and what it means for fragile hummingbird populations. We've reached Pepper Trail in Ashland Oregon, hello.

PEPPER TRAIL: Good morning.

AMT: Before we do anything else we just have to talk about that little bird. You just heard that little buzz away. There so tiny and delicate, huh?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes. They're an amazing combination of fragility and vitality. They're so tiny but they're so full of life and their skills in the air just unrivaled. So they're extraordinary birds.

AMT: I had no idea they were the target of criminals or that there was such a thing as a forensic ornithologist. Tell us what you do.

PEPPER TRAIL: Well my job at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory is to identify birds and bird remains that are seized as evidence in wildlife crime investigations. So the Fish and Wildlife Service has about 200 special agents and about 200 wildlife inspectors who are in the field conducting investigations. And when they find evidence that federal wildlife law has been violated they often send the evidence to our laboratory for further analysis. And if it's the remains of a bird or a whole bird it comes to me to identify the species.

AMT: And are you called to testify sometimes in cases?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes I'm called usually, at least once a year, to testify in court.

AMT: Okay, well let's get to the strange case of the hummingbird love charms. Take us back to that day in 2013 and the beginning of this investigation.

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes it was in March. And when I get evidence, the evidence is checked into our facility through a very controlled procedure to maintain the integrity of the chain of custody. So I don't always know what's coming. So I go down and I check it out and then I go back to my workspace and examine it. And I was just shocked. I had never heard of such a thing. But these were the intact dried bodies of hummingbirds, the whole body. They were placed inside a red paper tube which was then wrapped in red satin threads and the whole thing was in a little bag with a printed prayer in Spanish. So I had no idea what I was looking at or what the background of these was. But between 2013 and now I've now worked 30 cases of these sorts of objects with over 300 individual birds. So it turns out to be quite a significant trade that we're really trying to understand and have a impact to stop.

AMT: I have so many questions but let's first start, the first box you get. How big is it? How many birds are in there?

PEPPER TRAIL: In the first submission. I think there were about 75 birds and each one is in its own individual packet. They're sold as an individual Love charm. The Association of hummingbirds with love goes all the way back to the Aztecs in Mexico. So it has a very long tradition and at some point along the way that association was transformed into the selling of these of these love charms and the prayer that comes with them is very interesting. It is a combination of very old traditional beliefs calling on traditional god like figures, with calling on the performer of the or the owner of the charm to perform Hail Marys and Paternoster as well. So it's a combination of traditional Catholic beliefs that's associated with the use of these love charms.

AMT: And they have a special name, don't they in Spanish?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes they're called Chuparosas which I'm told in colloquial Spanish means flower liquor or flower sucker. And that's sort of a colloquial Spanish name for hummingbirds in Mexico. They're often called Chuparosas and the charms are called Chuparosas so you can trace this back to the days of the Aztecs but did you know where that box of hummingbird's came from when they gave it to you. Well it was seized in Fort Worth Texas. Our investigator was based in Texas so most of his work was there. We believe that all of these charms are produced in Mexico. They are then brought into United States and they're sold in barrios or botanic goes these shops that sell traditional herbal medicines and other remedies to the Hispanic population in those communities. And so we've now found them very widespread throughout the Southwest, even up into the rest of the Lower 48, Minneapolis, New York. We believe that this trade is extending to Hispanic communities all throughout the U.S.

AMT: Well we sent a freelancer to one of the markets in Mexico City where hummingbird loved charms are sold. It's called the Sonora market. Let's listen to a conversation with one of the vendors.

SOUNDCLIP

VENDOR: They are used for love. The hummingbird is a bird of love. It is the bird that opens the channels so that people will like them. You have to put them in a red loot bag. If we have a special person that we want to attract then we write the name of the person on the paper, put it in the bag with the hummingbird and wear it around the neck. You have to bait the hummingbird with the other person smell. On the first day of the month, you have to bait them with their perfume.

PRODUCER: How much does the hummingbird cost?

VENDOR: The prepared one costs 290.

PRODUCER: How do you prepare it?

VENDOR: We need to see the name of the person. We need to know who you want to attract. And the only thing the person must do is bathe with the perfume of the person they want to attract, nothing more. It's fast. 10 minutes exactly.

PRODUCER: Well what about the hummingbirds? Should they have a different size?

VENDOR: No no no no. The animal comes in many size. The size doesn't matter. The hummingbird is just for love, no matter the size or color. There are some that have a little green breast and there are others that have a little blue one. But it is all the same.

PRODUCER: Those, they no longer have their beak, right?

VENDOR: What? No that's normal. When he dries out it falls off normally.

PRODUCER: Who are the people requesting or buying them the most?

VENDOR: Before, it was a lot of young people. Now it's all ages. There is such a lack of love that everyone wants the hummingbirds, young and old. And before it was almost exclusively women. But now it's both men and women.

PRODUCER: And has anyone returned to tell you that it worked?

VENDOR: Yes many people, many people.

AMT: Well that is from the Sonora markets in Mexico City. Pepper Trail so that vendor would be selling what you described; the hummingbird in the red cone in the satin thread and the poem.

PEPPER TRAIL: Exactly yes. It's very interesting to hear that clip. The one thing I would mention is that the gentleman when he said that the beak falls off normally, I think he was doing it old salesmanship there to sell some damaged goods because we almost never see them without the beak.

AMT: And I noticed too they said it was prepared one costs 290 pesos, which in Canadian dollars is just under 19 dollars.

PEPPER TRAIL: We've found in the U.S. they're usually being sold for around 20 dollars.

AMT: What have you discovered about how they actually kill them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well we are not sure how they're all killed but one of the surprising findings that we've made at our laboratory is we begin to routinely X-ray the bodies of the birds and we've found that between 20 and 30 percent of them were shot. Believe it or not I can only imagine it's very difficult to shoot a hummingbird. But there's a very very fine birdshot almost as fine as, let's say poppy seed. I mean just a tiny little lead shot that we find in the bodies of about 20 to 30 percent of these hummingbirds. So we believe some of them are killed with slingshots based on talking to informers, that small boys go out with slingshots and get them that way, and some may be caught in nets or with the use of something called Bird lime which is a sticky substance that can be put on the perch around where the hummingbirds are feeding and the hummingbirds land on their feet, get stuck and they capture them that way. So probably a variety of ways.

AMT: And the actual shooting, so they actually have something that can shoot like some birdshot that's small. What's the significance of the fact that they're using some kind of a weapon like that to kill them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well to me it suggests that this is a pretty well organized operation. It's not just village boys going out with slingshots and getting a few birds. But it's somebody who has a, as you say, a weapon that can shoot those and probably goes out deliberately to collect them in large numbers. And these charms that we're finding are usually- they bear evidence of mass production if you will. They come with a printed prayer. The prayer is always in the same wording a lot of these actually have those little Hecho in Mexico, made in Mexico, stickers on them. So this is not just something that a few people are doing in their villages in the remote interior of Mexico. This is an operation which is more organized and therefore has the potential to have a serious impact on populations of hummingbird's at least in local areas.

AMT: And can I just clarify this is illegal to bring these dead birds into the United States.

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes it's illegal in several different ways, potentially. All hummingbird's, as a group, are protected by an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species [unintelligible]. So they're all protected by that. And therefore to cross a border with hummingbirds, living or dead, you need to have paperwork that permits you to do that. And of course none of these are coming in with any kind of paperwork. In addition, most of the birds, 70 percent of the ones I've identified so far in my cases, are species that occur in the United States as well as Canada and are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So those are strictly protected within the United States. So this trade is illegal in a couple of different ways.

AMT: Now when we mentioned the importance of the hummingbird in certain Latin American cultures. We spoke to Jean Jerome Baudry the president of Consejo Cultural Yoruba of Canada in Toronto, a group that practices or promotes awareness of their spiritual belief system and it considers hummingbird's sacred. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

The Hummingbird has a very tight, it was like a messenger between the spirit world and the world of - not your ancestors - but spirits that have a knowledge of the elements of witchcraft and magic in our world. In some cases the hummingbird is used as part of an offering or sort of a secret ingredient in a preparation or consecration of certain spiritual entities, allowing almost that particular divinity to essentially, for lack of a better, walk the earth and interact with its realm in a more direct fashion. So one of the key elements is the hummingbird for those ceremonies. It's very selective and it's only when it's prescribed by divination or in terms of the ritual practice of bringing that divinity to life. I am far far far more concerned about the stresses on the ecosystem and the disappearance of entire species because of the ecological neglect and disregard than I do from religious practice.

AMT: So Pepper Trail what do you say to that?

PEPPER TRAIL: I certainly agree that the number of threats facing the hummingbirds are many and that the kind of highly selective use that is described there is not as significant as some of the other threats. But from my perspective, as a biologist not as a practitioner of any of these traditional beliefs, I understand the special feeling that people have about hummingbirds. There are extraordinary. And I understand why there are beliefs that are associated with them. It's just unfortunate, and I would hope ultimately reversible, that that belief translates into killing the birds in order to celebrate their special qualities. It would seem possible to me and maybe it's culturally naive but it would seem possible to celebrate their special qualities without killing them. And I would hope that that would be possible.

AMT: You know we heard on tape, at the beginning there are the Grouse mountain scene in B.C. where they're part of a study to track hummingbirds along the coast. How concerned are you about the decline in the population?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well hummingbirds perform an extremely important ecological role as pollinators and so many of our wildflowers are adapted to be pollinated by hummingbirds, most of the ones if you go out to look at wildflower displays most of the species that have long trumpet like shapes and often are red. So all those beautiful colorful red long throated flowers have evolved specifically to attract and reward hummingbirds and the hummingbirds return the favor by pollinating those flowers. And so if you lose pollinators you lose the populations of those wildflowers in a way that they have been able to thrive in the presence of hummingbirds. And so I'm very concerned about hummingbird populations because I love hummingbirds and because also they have a very important ecological role to play. And hummingbirds are in decline. Certain species very very much so the Rufus hummingbird that is the main species you have in Canada has declined significantly. So any threat that impacts some populations has a potential for a wider effect. And the magnitude of what we're seeing suggests that certainly if collecting is concentrated in particular areas, which is likely because of just logistics, those local populations are probably being impacted and the knock on effects of that are going to be quite serious I'm afraid.

AMT: Why do you love them?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well I love them because they are they're often described as flying jewels. I mean they are uniquely colorful. They're iridescence is remarkable and they are uniquely masters of flight. I mean there's no other bird that can fly backwards which hummingbirds routinely do, as they go back and forth between flowers. And they are just so full of vitality and yet also so tiny and fragile that they bring forth in me feelings both of admiration and awe and protectiveness. I mean I do feel that I want to protect them because they are fragile as well as beautiful.

AMT: So how hard is it to track down who's behind the trade?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well as always when we're looking at trade networks, for any illegal activity, whether it's wildlife trade or the drug trade or any trade like that, you make your seizure and you have the suspect who is caught in the act so to speak. So in our case, in the hummingbird cases, we are finding these in the stores where they're being sold. And so of course the owner of that shop is the suspect. But to trace the full chain of supply back to the people who produce the objects and there of course the the kingpins,, if you will, that's very difficult especially if it goes across a border. And certainly we believe that all of the people who are involved in the production of these charms are in Mexico. And so we have not unfortunately been able to make a whole lot of progress at tracking down the full network that supplies these charms. But in the case of the folks who are selling them, the penalties can be fairly severe. There's only been one case that has been sentenced so far of these 30 cases that I've been working on. But in that case the suspect, the person who owned the shop where these were being sold, was sentenced to pay four thousand dollar fine in additional thousand dollars in restitution and got a four year term of probation. So the penalties are serious enough that we hope there a strong disincentive to selling these objects and as the word spreads through the community where these are sold and used that that will be a disincentive to continuing this trade.

AMT: I'm just wondering you make the point that there's just something really special about these little birds. I'm wondering how hard it is sometimes to- you said you've looked at 300 of these carcasses of little hummingbirds. How hard is that to see that for you?

PEPPER TRAIL: Well the my job is sometimes quite sad. It's looking at the results of humanity's inhumanity to wildlife every day. And so it definitely does become difficult sometimes and especially with hummingbirds. When they're dead they're so they're so tiny. They're so delicate and vulnerable that it is, every now and then, it certainly does affect me deeply. When you look at a lot of them of course you kind of it becomes a bit, I guess you can say, become a bit hardened to the spectacle but every now and then that it strikes you anew how sad this is and how unfortunate that these beautiful little birds are being killed in the name of love. I mean it's to me it seems very ironic that an animal so full of vitality is being sacrificed in a vain hope for some kind of human connection.

AMT: Does it get personal sometimes?

PEPPER TRAIL: Yes. We have a hummingbird feeder at the lab you know a little humming bird feeder outside of our windows and it's a very strange feeling to be sitting in front of a table of dead hummingbirds and look out the window and there's the life hummingbirds zipping around and chasing each other and full of life and beauty, and then to go back to my work. So it does certainly affect me personally.

AMT: You know it's interesting because they come with a prayer or a poem and I understand that you're a poet.

PEPPER TRAIL: I am. I sometimes write poems about my forensics work, not too often because as you say it's sometimes difficult to write about. But I did write one poem about the true purpose of trade. Would you like to hear?

AMT: Yes I would.

PEPPER TRAIL: It's called Chuparosa, the heir of the [unintelligible] is heavy with chillies and dust. Within the dim glass case a ragged row of packets stenciled with hummingbirds bright red, hovering before bright red flowers. Each holds a true hummingbird a Chuparose dead, dried, bound within a paper tube, the head exposed encircled by a tassel of satin threads red as blood. Each a charm promising love from anyone, even a married woman, even a young girl, anyone you choose. It is all written out there in the [unintelligible] with a price. There are many ways to die for love, to leave the light, to exchange the taste of sweetness for the taste of dust. Here is one, 500 pesos, 20 dollars, whatever you have.

AMT: They really do affect you, huh?

PEPPER TRAIL: They do.

AMT: Well it's important to hear what you had to say. Pepper Trail, thank you.

PEPPER TRAIL: Thank you Anna Maria.

AMT: Pepper Trail a forensic ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He joined us from Ashland Oregon. That is our program for today stay with Radio 1 for Q. The Current moves into its summer season on Monday with guest host Mike Finnerty. You will hear me in repeats of our project Adaptation as we revisit that whole project throughout the summer and also as we revisit some of the big conversations of the past several months. I'll be on vacation and then I'll be working on a few exciting new topics this summer, in anticipation of bringing you a brand new season of The Current in September. In the meantime after our dive into the world of music created by artificial intelligence, Sony's research lab, research A.I. lab recently released a pop song intended to be in the style of The Beatles. We're going to leave you with that today. And this is Daddy's Car. Done with A.I. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti Mike Finnerty is here Monday. Piya Chattopadhyay is here tomorrow. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song: Daddy's Car]

Thursday June 21, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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