Extinction .in

A landscape may look healthy, but how

does it sound, and what does that say about how its wildlife is doing?

It's a question Bernie Krause has spent much of his life trying to answer. To

do so, he's recorded the sounds of thousands of places in far-flung corners of

the world.

He coined the word "biophany" to describe these recordings. These soundscapes

have helped him show what happens to animals in stressful environments, and

explain where our language comes from.

It wasn't what he originally planned to do.

Bernie Krause started as a classic musician. He joined the US folk group The

Weavers in 1963, but became famous for introducing some of the biggest bands in

the world to the synthesiser in the mid-1960s.

George Harrison, Simon & Garfunkel and The Doors all learned from Krause

and his partner Paul Beaver.

Beaver and Krause composed and played the Moog synthesiser with the Monkees

and provided soundtracks for big Hollywood blockbusters. They're credited with

introducing the synthesiser to pop music and film.

But it was a chance encounter while recording an album that put Krause's life

on to a different track.

"We were doing an album for Warner Brothers called 'In a Wild Sanctuary'

which was the first album ever to use ecology as its theme, and the first ever

to use natural soundscapes as a component of orchestration," he said.

"I just went out into the field and the first time I switched on the recorder

it changed my life, because the stereo space opened up in a way I had never

heard before.

"Being outside and hearing the wind in the trees and birds flying overhead

and the way space opened up was just magical to me so I decided that's what I

wanted to chase for the rest of my life."

He now has an archive of more than 4,500 separate soundscapes collected from

all over the world since 1968. More than half of the soundscapes he recorded

have since disappeared from nature.

Krause recorded this area in Northern California before and after logging

took place. The spectrogram of the recordings show the differences visually. The

spectrogram of the "before" recording is on the right.

The Arctic in Alaska and the Northwest Territories of

Canada are the most pristine sounds he has collected, as there are so few people

around.

He has examples from Borneo, Zimbabwe and the Amazon, which were crowded with

sound when he recorded them.

But political change, climate change and the impact of humans on the

landscape have all contributed to their loss.

In his book The Great Animal Orchestra, Krause uses the evidence of

'biophany' degradation to demonstrate how even healthy-looking ecosystems can

sound damaged.

Krause argues that in a pristine place, animals, insects, birds and reptiles

have each found a niche - their own frequency in which they can communicate to

each other and be heard above everything else.

"It's taken quite a while for all those critters to figure out where their

voices should be," he says.

By creating a spectrogram - a graph of the soundscape created by plotting

time against frequency - he's able to see the patterns that natural sound forms.

"When it looks very structured and you can see the discrimination between

those voices, you know it's healthy habitat."

A spectrogram can also instantly show if certain frequencies are missing.

 
Krause pioneered the Moog synthesiser in the 1960s
In 1988 Krause recorded a soundscape in part of northern California before a

new style of logging began. When he returned a year later, the scene looked

healthy, but many of the ecosystem's sounds had gone.

'Karaoke orchestra'

Krause also links the languages humans developed to the sounds of the

wild.

"Animals taught us to dance and sing because we were mimics - we were always

mimics," he says. "When we heard the biophany, the sound of living organisms in

a given habitat, we imitated those sounds and their structure.

"We used the sounds of the forest, or the desert, or wherever it was we

happened to live as a natural karaoke orchestra with which we performed. In

other words we used it as a backup band."

His collection mostly includes the sounds of whole landscapes, not

individuals, on land and beneath the sea. To record sea and river sounds, he

uses an underwater microphone called a hydrophonee.

He recorded a shrimp, which makes the loudest sound on the planet for its

size, and a sea anemone which isn't as quiet as it looks.

For Krause, listening to the environment provides a much-needed

perspective.

"We're not listeners, we are lookers," he says. "We understand our world

through what we see in Western culture, we are not guided much by what we

hear."

That's too bad. As Krause's work shows, there is so much to hear, if we'd

only just listen.