The voice of the natural world Bernie Krause

when I first began recording wild

soundscapes 45 years ago I had no idea

that ants insect larvae sea anemones and

viruses created a sound signature but

they do and so does every wild habitat

on the planet like the Amazon rainforest

you’re hearing behind me in fact

temperate and tropical rainforests each

produce of vibrant animal Orchestra that

instantaneous and organized expression

of insects reptiles amphibians birds and

mammals in every soundscape that Springs

from a wild habitat generates its own

unique signature one that contains

incredible amounts of information and

it’s some of that information I want to

share with you today the soundscape is

made up of three basic sources the first

is the geophone II or the non-biological

sounds that occur in any given habitat

like wind in the trees water in a stream

waves at the ocean shore movement of the

earth the second of these is the bio

phanie the bio phanie is all of the

sound that’s generated by organisms in a

given habitat at one time and in one

place and the third is all of the sound

that we humans generate that’s called

anthro phony some of it is controlled

like music or theater but most of it is

chaotic and incoherent which some of us

refer to as noise there was a time when

I considered wild soundscapes to be a

worthless artifact they were just there

but they had no significance well I was

wrong what I learned from these

encounters was that careful listening

gives us incredibly valuable tools by

which to evaluate the health of a

habitat across the entire spectrum of

life

when I began recording in the late 60s

the typical methods of recording were

limited to the fragmented capture of

individual species like birds mostly in

the beginning but later animals like

mammals and amphibians to me this was a

little like trying to understand the

magnificence of Beethoven’s fifth

symphony by abstracting the sound of a

single violin player out of the context

of the orchestra and hearing just at one

part fortunately more and more

institutions are implementing the more

holistic models that I in a few of my

colleagues have introduced to the field

of soundscape ecology when I began

recording for over four decades ago I

could record for ten hours and capture

one hour of usable material good enough

for an album or a film soundtrack or a

museum installation now because of

global warming resource extraction and

human noise among many other factors it

can take up to a thousand hours or more

to capture the same thing fully fifty

percent of my archive comes from

habitats so radically altered that

they’re either altogether silent or

could no longer be heard in any of their

original form the usual methods of

evaluating a habitat have been done by

visually counting the numbers of species

and the numbers of individuals within

each species in a given area however by

comparing data that ties together both

density and diversity from what we hear

I’m able to arrive at much more precise

Fitness outcomes and I want to show you

some examples that typify the

possibilities unlocked by diving into

this universe this is Lincoln meadow

Lincoln meadows a three and a half hour

drive east of san francisco and the

sierra nevada mountains at about 2,000

meters altitude and i’ve been recording

there for many years in 1988 a logging

company convinced local residents that

there’d be absolutely no environmental

impact from a new method they were

trying called selective logging taking

out a tree here and there rather than

clear cutting a whole area with

permission granted to record both before

and after the operation I set up my gear

and captured a large number of dawn

choruses to very strict protocol and

calibrated recordings because I wanted a

really good baseline and this is an

example of a spectrogram spectrogram as

a graphic illustration of sound with

time from left to right across the page

15 seconds in this case is represented

and frequency from the bottom of the

page to the top lowest to highest and

you can see that the signature of a

stream is represented here in the bottom

third or half of the page wild birds

that were once in that meadow are

represented in the signature across the

top there are a lot of them and here’s

Lincoln meadow before selective logging

well a year later I returned and using

the same protocols and recording under

the same conditions I recorded a number

of examples and same dawn choruses and

now this is what we’ve got this is after

selective logging you can see that the

stream is still represented in the

bottom third of the page but notice

what’s missing in the top two-thirds

and coming up is the sound of a

woodpecker well I’ve returned to Lincoln

meadow 15 times in the last 25 years and

I can tell you that the by a phony the

density and diversity of that by a phony

has not yet returned to anything like it

was before the operation but here’s a

picture of Lincoln meadow taken after

and you can see that from the

perspective of the camera or the human

eye hardly a stick or a tree appears to

be out of place which would confirm the

logging companies contention that

there’s nothing of environmental impact

however our ears tell us a very

different story young students are

always asking me what these animals are

saying and really I’ve got no idea but I

can but I can’t tell you that they do

express themselves whether or not we

understand it is a different story I was

walking along the shore in Alaska and I

came across this tide pool filled with a

colony of sea anemones these wonderful

eating machines relatives of coral and

jellyfish and curious to see if any of

them made any noise I dropped a

hydrophone an underwater microphone

covered in rubber down the mouth part

and immediately the critter began to

absorb the microphone into its belly and

the tentacles were searching out the

surface for something of nutritional

value the static like sounds that are

very low that you’re going to hear right

now

yeah but watch when it didn’t find

anything to eat I think that’s an

expression that we understood in any

language at the end of its breeding

cycle the Great Basin spadefoot toad fix

itself down about a metre under the

hardpan desert soil of the American West

where it can stay for many seasons until

conditions are just right for it to

emerge again when there’s enough

moisture in the soil in the spring frogs

will dig themselves to the surface and

gather around these large vernal pools

in great numbers and they vocalize in a

in a chorus that’s absolutely in sync

with one another and they do that for

two reasons the first is competitive

because they’re looking for mates and

the second is cooperative because if

they’re all vocalizing in sync together

it makes it really difficult for

predators like coyotes foxes and owls to

single out any individual for a meal

this is a spectrogram of what the frog

chorusing looks like when it’s in a very

healthy pattern

Mono Lake is just the east of Yosemite

National Park in California and it’s a

favorite habitat of these toads and it’s

also favored by US Navy jet pilots who

trained in their fighters flying them at

speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometres an

hour and altitudes only a couple of

hundred meters above ground level of the

mono basin very fast very low and so

loud that the anthro funny the human

noise even though it’s six and a half

kilometers from the Frog Pond you just

heard a second ago it masked the sound

of the chorusing toads you can see in

this spectrogram that all of the energy

that was once in the first spectrogram

is gone in the top end of the

spectrogram and that there’s breaks in

the coursing at two and a half four and

a half in six and a half seconds and

then the sound of the jet the signature

is in yellow at the very bottom of the

page

now at the end of that flyby it took the

frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their

chorusing synchronicity during which

time and under a full moon we watched as

two coyotes and a great horned owl came

in to pick off a few of their numbers

the good news is that with a little bit

of habitat restoration and fewer flights

the frog populations once diminishing

during the 1980s and early 90s have

pretty much returned to normal I want to

end with a story told by a beaver it’s a

very sad story but it really illustrates

how animals can sometimes show emotion a

very controversial subject among some

older biologists a colleague of mine was

recording in the American Midwest around

this pond that had been formed maybe

sixteen thousand years ago at the end of

the last ice age was also formed in part

by a beaver dam at one end that held

that whole ecosystem together in a very

delicate balance the one afternoon while

he was recording there suddenly appeared

from out of nowhere a couple of game

wardens who for no apparent reason

walked over to the beaver dam dropped a

stick of dynamite down it blowing it up

killing the female and her young babies

horrified my colleague remained behind

to gather his thoughts and to record

whatever he could the rest of the

afternoon and that evening he captured a

remarkable event the lone surviving male

beavers swimming in slow circles crying

out inconsolably for its lost mate and

offspring this is probably the saddest

sound I’ve ever heard coming from any

organism human or other

yeah well there are many facets to

soundscapes among them the ways in which

animals taught us to dance and sing

which I’ll say for another time but you

have heard how by otha knees help

clarify our understanding of the natural

world you’ve heard the impact of

resource extraction human noise and

habitat destruction and where

environmental sciences have typically

tried to understand the world from what

we see a much fuller understanding can

be got from what we hear by alpha knees

and Giovanni’s are the signature voices

of the natural world and as we hear them

were endowed with a sense of place the

true story of the world we live in in a

matter of seconds a soundscape reveals

much more information from many

perspectives from quantifiable data the

cultural inspiration visual capture

implicitly frames a limited frontal

perspective of a given spatial context

while soundscapes wide net scope to a

full 360 degrees completely enveloping

us and while a picture may be worth a

thousand words a soundscape is worth a

thousand pictures and our ears tell us

that the whisper of every leaf and

creature speaks to the natural sources

of our lives which indeed may hold the

secrets of love for all things

especially our own humanity and

the last word goes to a Jaguar from the

Amazon thank you for listening