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Listening to nature: Bernie Krause
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a conversation with Bernie Krause. For the
full transcript and the audio recording, visit www.howtobeheardbook.com and use
the password
consc1ous
.
Dr. Bernie Krause is a musician, a naturalist and the world’s leading
nature sound recordist. During the 1950s and ‘60s, he devoted himself to
music, replacing Pete Seeger as the guitarist for the Weavers and then, in
Beaver and Krause, playing a key role in developing the tools and
methods of electronic music, working with The Byrds, The Doors, Peter
Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, George Harrison and Van Morrison, among
others. For more than 40 years since then, Bernie has traveled the world,
recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and natural
environments. He has recorded more than 5,000 hours of wild
soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature due to
encroaching noise and human activity; these include the sounds of over
15,000 species. He gave a TED talk in 2013 on the voice of the natural
world. He has made countless albums, written numerous papers and
books, and recently collaborated with UK composer Richard Blackford to
create
The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony for Orchestra and Wild
Soundscapes
. Bernie and his wife, Kat, live in Sonoma, CA.
Julian Treasure: Bernie, you’ve talked to me in the past about
biophony. Could you tell us what you mean by that word?
Bernie Krause: Well, biophony is one component of what we consider
the soundscape, what Murray Schafer referred to as the soundscape. I’ve
reduced it to 3 basic sources. The first source is the geophony, or the non-
biological sound that occurs in a wild environment, wind in the trees,
water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, that sort of thing. It’s non-
biological, natural sound. The second is the biophony, and this is the
most important, because it’s the collective voice made up of all vocal
organisms in a given habitat. The operative term here is collective,
because each habitat expresses itself very much like we distinguish one
human voice from another. It has its own signature. The signature is
made up of all of the organisms that vocalise at a given time, in a given
habitat. It actually defines the habitat, by the way.
Julian Treasure: What’s the third element of the entire soundscape?
Bernie Krause: Well, the third element is the sounds that we humans
make. I call it anthropophony. Anthropophony is made of 2 classes of
sound. The first class is controlled sound, like speech, music, theatre. The
second is sound that’s more chaotic, incoherent. That’s what we call
noise, because it’s not conveying any particular kind of information. It’s
just sort of random sound in a given moment and in a given place,
wherever we are, like automobiles going by, or leaf blowers, or lawn
mowers, that kind of thing, jet planes flying overhead.
Julian Treasure: Just raises the question in my mind, do animals make
noise as well, or is everything, all the sound that they create, useful? Is
noise, to some extent, the garbage of sound?
Bernie Krause: I believe so, but animals, of course, do make noise as the
shuffle through leaves, or walk through a forest, and step on twigs, they
crack, and so on. Yes, they make noise, but their noise is relatively little
compared to what we humans produce.
Julian Treasure: The planet has changed a huge amount in the last few
hundred years, with anthropophony starting to dominate more, and
more, and more. I remember reading something from you, and in fact, I
quoted it in my book, some time ago, about the time it now takes to
record a few minutes of nature sound unpolluted by anthropophony.
What is your experience with that now, Bernie?
Bernie Krause: I actually make the point in my recent book,
The Great
Animal Orchestra
, that when I first began to record, I could record for 10
hours and capture one hour of usable material. That was in 1968. Now, it
takes me almost 2000 hours to capture the same thing in many habitats.
Julian Treasure: My goodness.
Bernie Krause: Yeah, yeah.
Julian Treasure: That is shocking. Presumably, the kind of intrusive
noises, even if you were out in the wild somewhere, would be a distant
leaf blower, or an aeroplane overflying the area.
Bernie Krause: Yes. That’s another problem. There’s almost no place on
Earth now that doesn’t have some human signature that intrudes on the
silence and solitude of a place.
Julian Treasure: Can you think of anywhere that still is truly natural,
and there’s no anthropophony going on?
Bernie Krause: I’ve found a couple of places, actually. You have to
think about this in terms of times of quiet intervals. One of them is not
very far from where I live, about 20 minutes from our home in Glen
Ellen, California. We can drive to this spot, and very often, in the
mornings, just before and until just after sunrise, we can record in that
spot and maybe hear one plane flying over in an hour. There are places in
the panhandle of New Mexico, in the United States, a state that borders
on the Mexican border, where we recorded for 2 weeks and heard one
aeroplane in a 2 week period. In Alaska, where there are only 500,000
people in a state that’s a third the size of the lower 48 in the United
States, and I’ve recorded there in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and
we’ve recorded for 10 days without hearing another intrusion of human
noise, just ourselves.
Julian Treasure: I remember you talking about Alaska. I think you’ve
said that’s your favourite place in the world. Is it still?
Bernie Krause: Yes, because there are so few people. You can get to places
where there are no trails. You can walk for a week in any direction and
not come upon a fence, or a road, or another human habitation. What’s
nice, also, about Alaska, is there’s signage. There are no eager rangers
describing to you the life cycle of an elk or a wolf. Best of all, of course,
there’s nothing to buy.
Julian Treasure: Although, I imagine, your life is on the line. If you’re
that far from civilisation, you slip and break an ankle, and you’re in big
trouble, aren’t you?
Bernie Krause: Well, I’ll take my chances in Alaska anytime over
Hollywood!
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