WGlen Ellen, Calif. — In the living
room of bioacoustician Bernie Krause's California wine
country home, a reporter's click on a Google Earth computer
image of Antarctica produces a sound so foreign, there
seems no possible way it could emanate from this planet.
But Dr. Krause, who has spent the past 40 years collecting
sounds from around the globe, explains that the clicks,
chirps, and howling ethereal decrescendos are indeed from
this planet: They're made by Weddell seals inhabiting
the frozen continent's McMurdo Sound.
"You know what they're doing?" asks Krause,
suddenly animated. "They're imitating thunderstorms
at the equator." He explains the theory that the
seals use their skulls to pick up the electrical energy
of thunderstorms transmitted through the earth's magnetic
field from half a world away.
"They're social animals," he says. "They
do that over long stretches of open water."
The aquatic discourse is among the 30-plus sounds now
available as The Wild Soundscape Tour, a free add-on layer
to Google Earth, the downloadable navigation tool that
allows users to scan the planet using steerable satellite
images. Through Krause's WildSanctuary.com website, one
can now not only see the Amazonian rain forest, but hear
the monkeys, jaguars, birds, and musical frogs that call
it home. The same goes for the inhabitants of the wild
places of Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, Madagascar, Indonesia,
and Yellowstone National Park, as well as the not-so-wild
urban soundscapes of New York, London, Paris, and Lisbon.
"You can immediately hear a difference between the
places," says 30 Proof Media creative director Jesse
Evans, explaining that police sirens and even just the
traffic set the cities apart. "Once you start paying
attention to it, you hear it immediately," says Mr.
Evans, who with his brother/partner, Sam Evans, created
the sound-embedding program.
Any programmer can add a layer of data, known as a KML
layer, to the Google Earth program; in the case of The
Wild Soundscape Tour, Google was impressed enough to give
30 Proof access to one of its developers to assist the
project.
"When we see such truly spectacular KML layers, we
do reach out with advice and support," says Megan
Quinn, a Google spokesperson.
Paying attention to what people hear has become Krause's
mission in life. Raised in Detroit, Krause moved to New
York City to seek fame and fortune as a musician, and
played for a time with the folk group The Weavers. He
became better known for his pioneering work with the Moog
synthesizer, teaming with Paul Beaver to put out The Nonesuch
Guide to Electronic Music. A 1968 collaboration with Mr.
Beaver called Into a Wild Sanctuary focused on ecology
by creating an album of natural sounds.
"By natural sound I'm talking about the entire soundscape,
not separating out signature animals like wolves, a bird
or two, or whales. That was a big shift in musical concept,
which nobody got until..." Krause pauses to think.
"They're just beginning to get it now."
In that early natural sound endeavor, Krause ventured
from his San Francisco base to Muir Woods, Baker Beach,
Fisherman's Wharf, and the San Francisco Zoo. "Having
to record outside, and work in the natural world for the
first time, I was terrified, actually [of what may have
been lurking there]," he confesses. "But having
to do that for the album changed my life, as soon as I
turned on the recorder and heard that sound."
He says the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees
relaxed him, and he realized there was nothing to fear
at all.
Krause continued to record, ranging farther afield; first
to California's Sierra Nevada and Trinity Mountains, and
later to Alaska, Latin America, Indonesia, and Africa,
giving up traditional music and getting a PhD in bioacoustics.
"I was aware of this kind of atavistic relationship,
a sense of experiencing a distant past, not only in my
life, but in human life," he says, referring to a
feeling of a deep genetic connection between humans and
the natural world that was triggered by sound.
Krause's recording of "biophonies," the combined
sounds that whole groups of living organisms produce,
consumed him, he says, "to the point where I was
working with mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's camp,
slept with them in their nests."
In 1985 Krause did gain some fame for using his recordings
of humpback whale feeding sounds and social noises to
help lure Humphrey, a humpback that had swam up California's
Sacramento River, back to the ocean. Krause was called
back to action a few weeks ago, when an injured mother
and calf humpback found themselves in the same predicament.
Again, Krause – who had been dubbed the " whale
whisperer" – arrived on the scene with his
recordings. But the whales didn't respond, and his recordings
were abandoned in favor of banging on pipes to frighten
the mammals back to sea.
"These are wild animals. If we have human expectations
that anything we try is gonna work, or one of the things
we try is gonna work, we're gonna be very disappointed."
The whales returned to the ocean of their own accord.
Krause's archive, believed to be the largest privately
held collection of natural sounds in the world, now boasts
3,500 hours of soundscapes from more than 1,200 habitats,
encompassing 15,000 species. His Wild Sanctuary company
records marine and terrestrial life from pole to pole,
providing sounds for film, music for download, and sound
installations for museums, zoos, and aquariums.
Of course, it's not the safest job in the world. Krause
has tales of warding off a polar bear with a flare gun,
of a killer whale leaping onto the ice next to him to
pounce on a penguin, of a gorilla tossing him 15 feet
into stinging nettles, and of a grizzly bear engulfing
Krause's microphone in his mouth. ("So I have the
only surround recording of what it's like to be in a bear's
mouth," he says.)
Wild Sanctuary's ambitious Google Earth undertaking holds
the prospect of focusing millions of primarily urban Google
Earth users on the natural world. When a user clicks on
a soundscape icon at earth.wildsanctuary.com, a box pops
up with field notes describing the location, when the
recording was made, weather conditions, and the sources
of several of the sounds. Some, such as a recording made
north of California's Lake Tahoe, come with before-and-after
recordings – in this case recordings taken before
and after selective logging took place at the spot in
the late 1980s. Krause returned to the meadow 15 times
after the logging. A gurgling brook takes center stage
to a background cast of birds in the "before"
recording; "after" reveals little life at all.
"Forty percent of my library is from now-extinct
habitats. That's in my working lifetime," Krause
says, who preparing for a trip to Alaska's Katmai National
Park to record grizzly bears.
His goal is to get people to reconsider a culture in which
noise equates with power, in favor of one in which people
value the importance of natural sounds in their own lives.
"If you listen, and listen right, it changes your
concept of time. You can't hear it in a four-frame cut,
like we're used to.... You have to spend the time out
there to engage and hear that...." he pauses to listen
to the distinct, intermittent click coming from just outside
his recording studio, "...the click of the oakworm
out there."
Krause notes that there's a healing quality to what he
refers to as the "voice of the divine" in natural
sound – but it won't come to those used to instant
gratification.
"You have to spend time hearing the whole call of
a bird, which may take 45 seconds, or the song of a whale,
which may take 45 minutes. Or to hear a series of repeated
calls in a rain forest – it may take 30 hours. So
your time changes, your whole sense of cycles changes,
and you become more connected to the natural world around
you and your own cycles of health and awareness. Which
are more natural."
"And, he says, "it makes you feel better."
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INFORMATION
This article first appeared in USA Today.
Their website can be found at http://www.usatoday.com
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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