Michael Hearst – Celebrating the Bizarre in the Animal World

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer Michael Hearst says, “If it acts, looks, smells, and does anything that makes you stop and go, whoa, dude, what’s up with that?”, then it qualifies as an unusual animal worthy of his attention in song and book. Even the names of his favourites are strange: Blue-Footed Booby, the Blobfish, Jesus Christ Lizard (it can walk on water). In this talk, Michael discusses some of these unusual gifts of nature and also plays some of the music he composed for them, on instruments that have equally bizarre names: the theremin and the stylophone.