When was the last time you stepped outside and just listened? Bernie Krause made a career out of this in the late 1970’s when he began recording soundscapes of wildlife and natural sounds around the globe. I stumbled upon Krause’s story while listening to an episode of NPR’s podcast, Invisibilia entitled “The Last Sound”.
NPR’s Invisibilia: The Last Sound
Krause’s extensive career in audio recording began over twenty years before he started capturing the sounds of the natural world. He quickly climbed the ranks of electronic music engineering and producing in the early 60s. He joined the Moog company as a sales representative and became one of the first champions of the machine. His expertise lead him to working with some of the biggest names in music at the time including The Doors and The Beach Boys. He also assisted in creating the helicopter sounds in Apocalypse Now and the synthesizer sounds that eventually became the iconic THX Deep Note.
In 1968, the idea of mixing the THX Deep Note with natural sounds was brought up to Krause and his musical partner Paul Beaver. As a person who never grew up with animals – he literally went into anphylaxis as a child the moment someone brought a pet into his family’s home for the first time – Krause was not jumping out of his seat at the idea. However, duty called and Krause found himself in the Muir Woods in California with a haul of recording equipment. The moment he put on his headphones, everything changed. Krause recalls hearing one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard as ravens rushed above him. He decided then and there that he would leave the wild party life of the music buisiness to focus on recording the tranquil sounds of the natural world.
And he did. Krause began recording soundscapes of wildlife all around the world. He captured mystical sounds from whispering wolves and bats at the dead of night. These sounds came together to create a sort of wilderness orchestra. In creating these recordings, Krause noticed that through these sounds different animals of different species seemed to be using their unique noises to literally create harmonies. When looking at the recordings as a picture called a spectrogram, he found that the sounds had a musical structure. Krause took these findings to the scientist Stuart Gage and they came up with the hypothesis that different animals use different pitches and rhythms so they don’t get into each others way when communicating with their own kind.
From these findings, Bernie assisted in developing a new field of study called soundscape ecology. As he continued his research through recording, he began to notice something that alarmed him.
In the early ‘90s, Krause made a recording of thousands of spadetoad frogs at Mono Lake near Yosemite. The frogs come together to create one solid sound to camoflage as one giant frog – a defense mechanism. After the military began performing test flights over the area, the frogs lost synchronicity due to the loud sounds of the jets. This has lead to a considerable decrease in the population of the species.
Krause believes that of the 1,300 habitats he has recorded, less than half of them remain. The loss of these habitats has a major impact on all species – including humans. As humans, we tend to view ourselves as seperate from wildlife, but our interferences in the soundscapes of the natural world have lead to significant impacts on our environment like droughts and wildfires.
“Until you get rid of the terms that define our position as being seperate from nature, we’re never going to get anywhere. We’re not separate. This is – we’re part of that. And we’re fouling our house” Krause tells Invisibilia listeners.
We can learn a lot from listenening. It time for us as humans to take a moment, be still, and hear the world around us.