A Hit Song for an Owl

1. The Prince Albert Station for Avian Research

In the remote wilderness of central Saskatchewan's Prince Albert National Park, within nearly four thousand square kilometres of protected nature, stands the lonely Prince Albert Station for Avian Research. It is a modest building; one story of eggshell white concrete with a domed glass enclosure to house it's various species of resident birds. It has one employee.

Dr. Robert Katz is a statistician specializing in endangered and migratory birds. He earned his PhD at the University of Toronto. On a typical day, he begins work at PASAR shortly before sunrise to feed his charges breakfast. He sweeps out the enclosure, files any outstanding expense reports. If it's winter he'll shovel the walkway in front of the building, or else sweep it of leaves in the autumn.

"Usually my duties take me two hours, never more than three," he tells me. "And then if it's not too cold maybe I'll grab my skis and hike around the trails for a while." The Prince Albert National Park has a network of trails for cross country skiing, birdwatching, horseback riding, and occasionally spotting herds of wild bison. "Wolves too, once in a while, but they never bother me."

I ask if life at the station has always been this way.

"Oh no," he says. "Things used to be quite lively." In years past, the facility maintained a full time crew of conservation officers, researchers, statisticians, clerks, custodians, and interns. Many of the country's premier conservation efforts had been conceived within the walls of PASAR. "And then there were the cuts," Robert explains.

In the spring of 2015, the provincial government introduced a conservative fiscal plan that, among other things, left rather less room for the study of birds. The interns, clerks, and custodians were cut free, the analysts and conservation officers transferred out along with most of the avian residents. "One day, I'm mapping the population distribution of the North American Whooping Crane alongside my team, the next I'm sweeping out the enclosure alone, and trying to figure out how to file an expense report for fluorescent tube lights."

By the summer of 2015, Dr. Robert Katz and a parliament of barn owls were all that remained of the research station. "I think someone downtown was fighting for us though, or else they would have boarded the place up entirely."

2. "Well, now I actually have to do the damned thing..."

Dr. Katz stumbled upon the idea for his experiment in the winter of 2016, nearly two years into professional solitude. By then he was working in pajamas. He played his music from the overhead speakers, left the enclosure doors ajar, and held lengthy one-sided conversations with his parliament.

One day, a manager arrived to conduct an inspection of the facility. She found an unkempt statistician singing energetically in a messy office. Music was blaring from the overhead and owls were flying from their enclosure to the building proper and back freely. She had to shout before Robert noticed her arrival, scaring him off his chair.

"It wasn't a very professional scene, certainly," Robert says, chuckling. "I remember looking up from the floor and thinking 'how do I make it out of this one?'" The explanation Robert concocted was that he was experimenting with the musical responsiveness of barn owls. One was on his desk, eating leftovers from his plate. "That's Louise," he told her. The manager nodded, visibly uncomfortable. "OK then," she had replied, continuing her inspection.

"She wasn't really interested in any of that, it turns out." Instead, the manager seemed to be taking inventory of all the facility's machinery, checking the serial numbers on each unit and writing on her clipboard. Robert went around tidying each room as she made her count. "I thought I was home free," Robert tells me. He resolved to put a bell on the door and keep the place a little cleaner in the future. The manager was on her way out, but then she paused and turned back. "What was that project called again?"

Robert froze up, thinking frantically, and then he said "Experiments in Musical Intelligence." The manager nodded, and made a little note on her clipboard. "Well, I thought. Now I actually have to do the damned thing," Robert recalls. He returned to his significantly tidier office, pulled a notebook from his desk, and labeled it Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

"Lucky for me, Experiments already existed, and it was very helpful," Robert laughs.

3. "I suppose you could call it dancing..."

The real Experiments in Musical Intelligence (or EMI), was founded in 1983 as an attempt to understand the structure of classical music, and ultimately allow a computer program to replicate it automatically. The program simply needed the parameters -or 'rules'- of classical music, and then it could endlessly compose songs by generating different rhythms and melodies adhering to those parameters; the more extensive the parameters, the more impressive the output. After seven years of development, the program had the ability to produce five thousand classical pieces in a single day.

It was on the basis of, and with code inspired by Experiments that Dr. Katz began his work; but for any sort of output, Robert needed parameters. Otherwise put, he needed to discover the rules of owl music. "They say music is best received when it has a rhythm similar to a human heartbeat, and a melody within the range of the human voice," Robert explains. Those were the first parameters in the code; but with a rhythmic range faster than a typical song, a melodic range much, much higher.

"From there I was basically grasping in the dark, taking wild guesses based on theories taken out of context." One was from Aristotle: 'music mimics the sound of happiness, anger, lust...' Another says that good music plays with the expectation of the listener, diverging from, delaying, completing patterns. "OK then, I thought, so what does a happy owl sound like? What pattern does an owl expect in a sequence of sound?" He experiments, guesses, takes out of context, he fills another parameter.

He replaces much of the sound output from classical instruments to soundbites recorded in his enclosure, sounds that are more familiar to his parliament.

The result is like nothing Robert had ever listened to; an excessively quick percussion of scrapes and rustling leaves, High pitched screeches over running water. "The song, for lack of a better word, was absolutely absurd. I remember thinking I've done it! I've finally gone crazy!" For a moment, he said, Robert considered calling HR and asking to be transferred to another position. Somewhere closer to civilization if possible, somewhere more nourishing for his sanity.

But then he looked up at the tamarack in the domed enclosure where the parliament would usually be sleeping at that hour. All of them were lined up on a branch, big round eyes staring down at him. "And then Louise swooped down next to the computer, where the song was playing."

He describes the way the owl tilted her head back and forth, investigating the sound. It hopped around, spread its wings out and shook them. "I suppose you could call it dancing."

4. Rock and Roller

I fly from my home in Wilmington, PA to Regina, and take a two and a half hour drive to Saskatoon where Dr. Robert Katz resides. It is a small city of less than 300,000 straddling the South Saskatchewan River. A popular Canadian band once named it the Paris of the Prairies.

Robert owns an old two story house in the countryside. It has a barn in the yard bordering on a big forest. We sit in his living room to begin the interview, grey carpet with a couch, love seat, and a long coffee table. A computer desk sits off to one side. Robert developed a sort of mad scientist look during his tenure with PASAR, and has since chosen to maintain it; his hair reminds me of Albert Einstein.

We drink coffee and I ask if he would pick up where we left off on the phone. Robert let his program generate dozens of songs throughout that winter, making little tweaks as he went. "I realized how very different the preferences of different individuals could be." He supposes that stems from an aspect of individuality that all mammals share. "I would have liked to develop that idea a little further if I had the time," he says.

In the summer months of the following year, the Prince Albert Station for Avian Research permanently closed it's doors. The manager had returned beforehand with a team of movers to pack up the equipment. They offered to transfer Dr. Katz to another station, but he declined. Robert now works in town as a policy analyst for the municipal government. The research station stands empty in the Saskatchewan wilderness.

I ask if he plans on revisiting his work. "It's a pleasant thought, but I think no. I like the work I do now," he says. In the same year PASAR closed down, Robert published all of his work in a journal, hoping to inspire someone to revisit the idea one day.

I ask if he kept any files before they cleared out the research station. "Of course! I was hoping you would ask," and then we are putting on our coats, heading out to the barn behind the house. It is a sagging structure with chipped red paint, I can hear hooting in the rafters as we enter.

Robert plugs a USB drive into his laptop and plays a file. The music that comes out of the computer is one of the strangest things I've ever heard. Fast rhythms, squeaky melodies, no recognizable pattern. An owl flies down from the rafters, light brown feathers and white, heart-shaped face. "Ah, it's you," Robert says. "OK, let's see..." He begins skipping through tracks on the media player, the owl screeches impatiently.

He finally settles on a track, "aah, there we go." The barn owl clearly agrees, hooting and ruffling it's wings joyfully, hopping around in circles. I must look baffled, because Robert says to me by way of explanation; "this one's more of a rock and roller."