But underneath this avant-garde language experiment from the 1950s lies a deeply touching love story.
Similarly, Byrne's lyrics were a blank-verse switchboard, patching through Dada language experiments, imagist poetry, scientific literature.
Alex (whose name began as an acronym for the research project Avian Language Experiment) died on Sept. 6, 2007, apparently of a fatal arrhythmia, heart attack or stroke.
The unflagging inventiveness of Stein's language experiments, and the consistent authority of her tone, brought her ever greater renown in the world of the avant-garde.
That doesn't happen – and I would have liked to see more discussion of the collapse of his language experiment and what that collapse implied.
Dr Herbert Terrace, a psychology professor at Columbia University famous for his language experiments in the 1970s with a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky, is on record as saying that Alex was making a "rote response".
The Sebeoks also argued that language experiments with the animals were unsuccessful because the researchers had not taken into account signals or cues from the trainers, like facial expressions.
The magazine's best critics always shied away from the wilder shores of the avant-garde, from the language experiments of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the dream world of the surrealists to the populist modernism of the Beats.
These are a few of the questions raised in a new documentary about the life of a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, the subject of a radical language experiment in the 1970s.
The analog electronic experiment is taken as an example to show Flex plug-in design, data communication based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), experiment simulation modeled by Modelica and control terminals' design.
