Bob Marley is the Name of a Bird

Performance, 15 min. A montage of pop songs, field recordings, vocal interpretations of bird songs, Karaoke and a monologue based on conversations with bird owners of The Surinamese Singing Bird Community Ringmasters, Amsterdam.

There is a Surinamese Singing Bird Community in Amsterdam. They are called Ringmasters, and they hold yearly singing competitions for their birds in the outskirts of Amsterdam. We spent a summer with there, documenting the competitions.

When many birds sing at once, it becomes hard to differentiate one from the other - for us. Every bird owner knows the song of his bird, because they spend hours every day listening to them.

The birds don’t sing like they do in Suriname. They have been trained to sing an ideal bird song - in fact, their songs are recorded and edited; badly articulated sounds are removed, refining the syntax and improving the clarity of the message.

Can bird songs be intellectual property? And if so, who do they belong to?