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The editor, Craig Conley, is a freelance writer and professional musician. An Amazon parrot is credited with inspiring the formation of Conley’s band, Captive Audience. The parrot was in one room and a microwave oven in another. The microwave would emit a beep every thirty seconds -- alerting the fact that it still held a cup of reheated coffee. The parrot would mimic each beep in turn, a forlorn whistle to a distant stranger. It was a surreal dialogue made up of two-second expressions of longing, and it went on like clockwork. Each was its own sort of captive, yet each was trying to connect with another and to chime its own existence. One day it became clear to Conley that the parrot and microwave had fallen into a bio-mechanical feedforward loop. He finally decoded their echoing message: ‘Something was left here, and it’s getting cold.’ He immediately formed a band to try to replicate that uncanny coupling of technological and biological intelligence.