Photo credit: Alex Braidwood licensed under CC BY 2.0
by David M. Sykes, Vice Chair, The Quiet Coalition
A wonderful, recent NPR podcast delves into the career and field recordings of Bernie Krause, PhD, who pioneered the emerging discipline of soundscape ecology. This podcast is great listening for the pandemic-induced “great silence” that we’re all currently living through.
Krause’ best known book appeared in 2012, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” which has been described as “the story of one man’s pursuit of natural music in it’s purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources, the music of the wild.” But Krause has just recently finished his 8th book—on top of hundreds of discographies. And, if you’re interested, his TED talk is a good listen.
Krause, who was born in Detroit in 1938, spent his early years promoting and performing on the then revolutionary Moog Synthesizer with leading 60s rock groups like The Doors and others. Having moved from the University of Michigan to Mills College in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s, he quit the drug-soaked music business and started recording natural sounds all over the world and working for museums and recording studios. From that deep immersion in the natural soundscape, he began developing original theories about sound that have gained him great respect. He’s best known for three core descriptive concepts: “Biophony” (sound from natural, biological sources); Geophony (sound from non-biological,natural sources); and Anthropophony (sound from human sources, including electro-mechanical noise).
Back in 1968, Krause founded his own organization, Wild Sanctuary. Now in his 80’s, he continues to be active in the field. Unfortunately, his home and virtually all of his belongings were destroyed several years ago when one of California’s wildfires swept through his neighborhood. Fortunately, his recorded archives were stored electronically off site, but everything else was gone. Still, he marshalls on, alerting the rest of the world to the concerning sounds he hears–or doesn’t hear.
The Quiet Coalition honors Krause’s pioneering work and his persistence and commitment to connecting our experience of soundscapes to the greatest issue of our time,climate change. The connections between the climate issue, the current pandemic, and the growing global problem of noise are not clear to many people, but Krause clearly understands how they are related.
