Bernie Krause

Bioacoustician, musician and field recording maestro Bernie Krause has been traversing the planet for over 50 years, collecting sounds from diverse locales both on land and sea.  Beginning his career as an engineer in a Los Angeles recording studio fuelled by a love of burgeoning technology and synthesizers, during the end of the 1960s, he became enamoured with documenting non-human origins of music. To date, he has amassed over 5,000 hours of recordings of natural habitats, including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species. 

Bernie Krause’s approach is unique. Contemplating the natural world as a poet, listening to animal vocalizations as a musician, Bernie Krause also studies it all scientifically. The analysis of the graphic representation of these soundscapes via spectrograms reveals that the sounds of the animal world, often perceived as nonsensical noises, are actually as carefully orchestrated as the most complex musical scores. The study of the acoustic organization of a particular ecosystem shows that at the heart of a soundscape each species spontaneously finds its own “acoustic niche.” Yet the observation of Bernie Krause’s soundscapes also reveals that the great animal orchestra, increasingly threatened by human activities, now risks being reduced to total and utter silence.

Spanning from North America and Central Africa to Brazilian rainforests and the oceans, the soundscapes were selected both for their diversity, as well as their “biophonies” – a sort of sonic thumbprint with characteristics that are unique to each ecosystem.