[ed. I'm not sold on the practical applications of this type of research, but I'm kind of glad somebody's doing it.]
One of most immediately striking features about Bernie Krause is his glasses. They’re big—not soda-bottle thick, but unusually large, and draw attention to his eyes. Which is ironic, as Krause’s life has been devoted to what he hears, but also appropriate, since it’s the weakness of his eyes that compelled Krause to engage with sound: first with music, and later the music of nature. Nearsighted and astigmatic, Krause has spent most of the last half-century recording biological symphonies to which most of us are deaf. (...)
At this particular moment in Earth’s history—the morning of what some scientists call the Anthropocene, an age in which human influence on natural processes is ubiquitous and immense—we have many tools to measure our ecological impacts: by eye, generally, focusing on particular species or guilds of interest, counting them in the field, peering by satellite at changes in land use, and translating our observations into the language of habitat type and biodiversity.
To Krause, these are measurements best made by listening to natural soundscapes. In a career of listening and recording, he’s amassed a veritable Library of Alexandria of nature’s sounds, and he emphasizes that they’re not merely recordings of individual creatures. The traditional approach of bioacoustics, focusing on single animals and species, is anathema. It’s “decontextualizing and fragmenting,” he says, like trying to extract a single violin from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “Take an instrument out of the performance, and try to understand the whole performance, and you don’t get very much,” he says.
Inevitably Krause has captured the players—bearded seals with voices that echo geomagnetic storms, baboons booming in granite amphitheaters, a fox kit playing with a microphone—but they’re incidental to recording whole habitats and communities.
In his home studio, perched on an oak-covered hillside in Glen Ellen, Calif., Krause plays me some of his favorites: a Florida swamp, old-growth forest in Zimbabwe, intertidal mangroves in Costa Rica, and a Sierra Nevada mountain meadow. As the sounds pour from speakers mounted above his computer, spectrograms scroll across the screen, depicting visually the timing and frequency of every individual sound. They look like musical scores.
One of most immediately striking features about Bernie Krause is his glasses. They’re big—not soda-bottle thick, but unusually large, and draw attention to his eyes. Which is ironic, as Krause’s life has been devoted to what he hears, but also appropriate, since it’s the weakness of his eyes that compelled Krause to engage with sound: first with music, and later the music of nature. Nearsighted and astigmatic, Krause has spent most of the last half-century recording biological symphonies to which most of us are deaf. (...)At this particular moment in Earth’s history—the morning of what some scientists call the Anthropocene, an age in which human influence on natural processes is ubiquitous and immense—we have many tools to measure our ecological impacts: by eye, generally, focusing on particular species or guilds of interest, counting them in the field, peering by satellite at changes in land use, and translating our observations into the language of habitat type and biodiversity.
To Krause, these are measurements best made by listening to natural soundscapes. In a career of listening and recording, he’s amassed a veritable Library of Alexandria of nature’s sounds, and he emphasizes that they’re not merely recordings of individual creatures. The traditional approach of bioacoustics, focusing on single animals and species, is anathema. It’s “decontextualizing and fragmenting,” he says, like trying to extract a single violin from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “Take an instrument out of the performance, and try to understand the whole performance, and you don’t get very much,” he says.
Inevitably Krause has captured the players—bearded seals with voices that echo geomagnetic storms, baboons booming in granite amphitheaters, a fox kit playing with a microphone—but they’re incidental to recording whole habitats and communities.
In his home studio, perched on an oak-covered hillside in Glen Ellen, Calif., Krause plays me some of his favorites: a Florida swamp, old-growth forest in Zimbabwe, intertidal mangroves in Costa Rica, and a Sierra Nevada mountain meadow. As the sounds pour from speakers mounted above his computer, spectrograms scroll across the screen, depicting visually the timing and frequency of every individual sound. They look like musical scores.
In each spectrogram, Krause points something out: No matter how sonically dense they become, sounds don’t tend to overlap. Each animal occupies a unique frequency bandwidth, fitting into available auditory space like pieces in an exquisitely precise puzzle. It’s a simple but striking phenomenon, and Krause was the first to notice it. He named it biophony, the sound of living organisms, and to him it wasn’t merely aesthetic. It signified a coevolution of species across deep biological time and in a particular place. As life becomes richer, the symphony’s players find a sonic niche to play without interference.
by Brandon Keim, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Brandon Keim
