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