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.
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