The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  Praia Beach on the Island of Faial in the Azores is about a third of the distance to North America from Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean. Thrust up from eons of volcanic action, the shoreline is rocky. Sound bounces off the geological structure of the site, amplifying each hit with a sharp, percussive, slaplike crack. Located on the leeward side of the island, Praia is a more protected beach than the others. Most of the time the wave action is caused by swells rather than wind. The action is rhythmic and higher pitched, with slightly shorter periods between hits than the waves at Big Sur.

  While Coney Island is calm, the waves along the shore at East Anglia in Great Britain near Aldeburgh, even on the brightest and most placid days, have an almost angry sound to them. The rake of the beach is steep as it drops off into the North Sea, and perhaps the sound results from a combination of the drop-off and the small rocks that line the shore jostling against one another as the waves break. Even small wave action has an agitated feel.

  The soundscapes of Martha’s Vineyard’s beaches vary widely, from the protected, shallow water coves off Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds along the northern part of the island to the impressive constant roar and low rumble of the Atlantic-exposed shores to the south.

  In calm weather, the waves at the beach of Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro come ashore at relatively short intervals as a result of a medium rake and periodic swells generated from the northeast. I always find the alluring, slow-rhythmic sound of these waves to be welcoming, beckoning me toward the tempting surf. In winter the wave action, enhanced by the wind coming off the South Atlantic, can stir Ipanema’s waters into waves ten or twelve feet high.

  Of course, water sounds can shift based on changes in the environment and on what kind of geography the water inhabits. A friend and fellow recordist Martyn Stewart, who had gone to the Louisiana shore along the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 BP oil disaster, remarked on the surf’s odd sound at the beaches affected by oil. He described it as having a slurpy, muddy, sluggish signature, almost as if the water were choking on itself or gasping for air. Aside from the initial absence of wildlife sounds, the muted slosh of the water-oil mixture at the beach was the most devastating impression he came away with—what he heard was far more powerful than what he saw. I had a similar chilling acoustic experience in Prince William Sound in the late spring and summer immediately following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. I had never before heard any part of Alaska so eerily quiet.

  Freshwater inland lakes, no matter how big, create shore waves that tend to be smaller in size, higher in pitch, and more rapid in sequence than those at the ocean—the lapping wave action on a calm day occurs at a much faster rate than would be heard at an ocean beach. These variations are, in part, a result of the different densities of fresh water and salt water, the latter being more dense. Lake waves have their own distinct acoustic signature, and likewise each lake is as different from the others as snowflakes: their sound depends on surrounding habitat; the position of our ears relative to the source; the weather; the season; and a plethora of other conditions described earlier. Wave action, whether with salt or fresh water, affects the calls and songs of shorebirds such as gulls, killdeers, and waterfowl. Each species must develop a voice that can carry over the sounds of the marine environment, with its distinct and dynamic range of turbulence. Anyone who has grown up by a remote lake and listened carefully to the setting will recognize unique seasonal patterns of the soundscape.

  Beach and lake soundscapes aren’t the only examples of water-based natural sound. Streams still flowing through viable riparian habitats create a wide range of voicings, depending on terrain, vegetation, time of day, season, precipitation, and flow rates. While each stream has a unique voice, variations tend to be much more subtle than with ocean shorelines. Nonetheless, streams inspire the same creative vocal solutions in the animal world. The American dipper is a medium-size bird that often lives and breeds under waterfalls or near fast-flowing water. Its voice—high-trilled expressions—can easily be heard above the rush of falling water, reaching a level that few in the avian world are able to outdo.

  Weather produces its own dynamic range of acoustic variants in the geophony. In the tropics, guides warned us that it wasn’t the snakes or the jaguars or the small critters that would do us in while we worked in the rain forests. It was the trees. Rain causes the canopies to take on weight, and since the root systems of most rain-forest trees are shallow, with the fertile topsoil only inches deep, top-heavy trees will crash down at the most inopportune times. I know. One fell only a few feet from where I was sitting one afternoon. I had no idea what was happening until after it landed, inches from my mic stand, as I crouched, completely astonished, nearby.

  Thunder can be dramatic and foreboding. When I was creating a series of commercial natural soundscape albums in the 1980s, I was told that the titles featuring thunder were taken off the shelves of Japanese stores because the clientele felt threatened by the sound; it reminded them of war. But the power of thunder can also be a harbinger of good things—such as the relief of a drought—as it booms and rumbles in the distance and rolls in ever closer. It can express itself as dry-sounding (as in an open desert environment), reverberant (as in many rain forests), or accompanied by rain or wind. I love the drama of weather sounds that are vivid and ominous but, when distant, can also be calming. I try to record thunder whenever it occurs. It’s tricky to capture, however. The force of the thunder’s loudest retort can almost never be anticipated correctly. When the level is set too high, the sound will easily overload the best recorders, but when the level is set too low, I’ll miss the subtle after-rumbles.

  Rain creates differing acoustic expressions depending on the force of the downpour and environment—urban, rural, or natural. Various weather dynamics over land and sea result in acoustic experiences that even acoustic ecologists sometimes miss but that are, nevertheless, extremely varied. Storm cells in tropical rain forests tend to pass by every afternoon, even in the “dry season.” When they do, the dense wall of falling water sounds like a freight train approaching. It moves remarkably fast. In a matter of a minute or so from the time you first hear thunder, the deluge advances with a force so powerful that it is always breathtaking to be caught in it. Because the vegetation in the upper canopies is so thick, the roar comes first from above, where the downpour initially hits. The full might of the rainstorm often fails to strike the forest floor directly. What you hear are melodic drips on the leaves—the sound of which depends on drop size—and periodic drops of water hitting small pools that have formed on the ground. In the best of stereo or surround recordings, we are able to capture this illusion of both near and distant rain events all at once. Just as quickly, though, the surge passes, the whole episode not lasting more than three or four minutes.

  If trees haven’t toppled on you or your mics, you’ll hear the rain forest’s insects begin to stridulate as the storm cell recedes into the distance—first one creature, then dozens, then thousands. As if cued by an unseen hand, and building dynamically like a great performance of Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem,” the birds will then start to fill the unoccupied acoustic slots until the forest is once again alive with a complex sonic texture that builds, climaxes, and shifts when the next cell forms or as time swings from late afternoon to dusk. The Sumatra and the mid-Amazon forests are my favorite places to witness moments like these—and the performance repeats in one form or another almost every day.

  In urban centers, rain sounds very different. There’s usually no forest canopy to divert and absorb the falling water, so the drops hit concrete or other hard, man-made surfaces directly. With all the structural facades in cities, rain often splashes and echoes off the sides of buildings or on metal roofs. If you listen closely, you can always tell the difference between rain recorded in a wild natural setting and rain recorded in a city—even without periods of telltale auto traffic and the sounds of tires splashing through puddles on wet pavement.

  Snow, too, creates a d
istinct acoustic environment—one that is as capricious in range as are the conditions under which snow occurs. It is extremely hard to capture an acoustic impression of a falling snowflake. The sound of snow falling is, for recordists, a tranquil delicacy akin to a fine gourmet treat. As with the few molecules of air displaced by a descending feather or a mote of dust, it is possible, if you’re very lucky, to catch that moment. A few have done it, although not in a way that the falling snow can be easily heard on a regular sound system. I record snow when it’s cold and damp. The problem is that many kinds of microphones don’t particularly like either situation. The best conditions to record the sounds of snow are when the temperature is near freezing—the snowflakes tend to be large, moisture-laden, and heavy. When the flakes have weight, and if I’ve managed to set up my mics properly—usually small ones pinned to the branches of low-lying bushes—I can catch the delicate vibrations of twigs as the snowflakes land on them. The impression is a soft, muffled tapping sound unique to snow.

  In common English vocabulary, we have only one word: snow. Unless you’re Barry Lopez describing snow in Arctic Dreams, one size fits all. More detailed descriptions are mostly visual—we almost never think of an attendant sound experience of snow other than remarking on the stillness that accompanies the moment. And while Western mythologies of the Inuit insist that their language has dozens of words that illuminate different snow-related experiences, a more careful look at Inuit vocabulary reveals a snow lexicon of about a half dozen or so words. Given the best terms in English, as Lopez shows us, we can discern fine or wet snow, frost, drifting or clinging fragments, snow-banks, blizzards, crusted snow, melting snow, candle ice, snow hitting standing water, and sleet, among other variations.

  A few years ago, R. Murray Schafer created a sound-sculpture commission for a German radio station titled “Winter Diary,” which poignantly captured the subtle elements of human interaction with the wintry soundscape as part of a larger piece. He recorded the various elements of the composition “live.” The piece unfolds with the sound of footsteps over crusted snow moving across a rural sound field from one space to another. After a segment of snow shoveling, we’re enveloped by stillness for a long period until the whistle of a train, far off in the distance, redirects our ear to a human sound that, to some of us, is a lovely resonance. The soundscape oscillates back and forth between a nonreverberant, all-absorbing calm and our engagement with percussion instruments, voices hollering, Native Americans performing, and melting ice dripping on metal—all set within an exterior snowbound scene, until the mind is wholly sated with a feeling of utter serenity.

  During the 1990s, I led a series of natural-sound listening and recording trips throughout Latin and North America, Africa, and Indonesia. On a kayak trip in Southeast Alaska, we set up camp on the southern Russell Fjord shoreline, about half a mile across the channel from Hubbard Glacier. Throughout the three or four days we spent there, the leading edge of the glacier continually released 300-foot-high masses of ice that would thunderously crash into the fjord below. These calving ice masses displaced large amounts of water, generating great waves that after a minute or so—traveling some 2,700 feet—would crash on the rocky beach below, where we had pitched our tents and set up our outdoor kitchen. It was a formidable sound, and it reminded us to pull our kayaks way beyond the high-tide line if we didn’t want to see them washed away.

  After a couple of days, I became curious enough to see if there was perhaps some acoustic energy generated by the glacial mass as a whole as it moved over the ground, forming the moraine below. After conferring with our guide, we decided that it was safe to paddle over to the glacial mass and hike back a kilometer or so from the calving face to investigate if there was anything to be heard. The mass of a constantly moving glacier is a geophysical sound source—a category that also includes avalanches, earthquakes, and thermal mud pots. These sounds, like all others, depend on our perspective in relation to the source and on the characteristics of the physical environment in which they occur. After we crossed the fjord and hiked onto the glacier, I crawled down into a crevasse and set a hydrophone in a shallow melting pool. While the group stood at a safe distance, I managed to catch an ominous and continuous low rumble more felt than heard, the movement of the entire glacier as it advanced a few centimeters an hour, and the first time that signature had ever been recorded from that perspective. (A word of caution: crawling down glacier crevasses is not a recommended activity!)

  Because it consists mostly of very low frequencies and sharp, loud spikes, ground movement itself is a difficult class of sound to capture. But if you can manage to record it, the sound is unforgettable. Mammoth Lakes is a very active seismic zone in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where periodic earthquake swarms frequently occur. In 1989 there were more than three hundred small quakes in a period of two days alone. This is not unusual. In the early 2000s, I managed to capture a nearly continuous swarm of invigorating jolts at Mammoth Lakes. Many of the rumblings, ranging between 3.5 and 5.5 on the Richter scale, were recorded for the first time with special types of microphones that—akin to a hydrophone—are referred to as geophones, or special contact mics. These microphones come in direct contact with a vibrating source, hence how I was now able to record the earth’s movement as a reproducible geophony—a sound anyone could actually hear.

  While capturing the sound of the ground moving was thrilling, among my favorite natural sounds is one that we cannot actually record: wind. That is, we cannot record the wind itself—we can only capture its effects. I am utterly transported when listening to the subtle differences as wind rustles through leaves or grasses, or the sound of pitched wind as it blows around snags or across the open ends of reeds by a lake or river, or as it courses through the needles or branches of conifers in a forest.

  John Muir, the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century naturalist who hiked the Sierra Nevada mountains and for whom Muir Woods is named, claimed that he could determine his location solely by the sound of wind that wafted through the spruce forests. He described such a moment when, in 1874, he rhapsodized:

  Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—Spruce, and Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.

  Strong wind can cause branches of trees to rub together, making them groan and creak. Depending on its force, wind in a microphone can produce “pops” and rumbles by overloading the extremely fragile capsule— the main component that detects sound waves and transforms them into electrical energy or digital formats. Capsules can pick up the slightest change in air pressure—shifts that most human and many animal ears would not discern. When the sound of wind is hushed and subtle, it sometimes reminds me of the breath of living organisms; it becomes the crossover between animals and an alive-sounding earth. This spiritus (“breath,” in Latin) is an intersection between all of the basic soundscape sources; many cultures recognize the wind’s effect as a root of spirituality, whether its origins are trees in a forest or the sound of a creature’s breathing.

  Among the most ethereal of geophonic sounds, wind comes to us as a kind of mystical force that we experience as it changes from raging to light, from gusty to a gentle, constant breeze. Combined with other weather elements, it will have the might of a tornado or hurricane or the explosive force of a whale’s breath. I was lucky to capture an expression of wind in the Southwest desert: Numerous storm cells were passing over our campsite in the New Mexican panhandle, interspersed with strong gusts that preceded each spectacular squall. I was recording the sound-scapes of spring when, trying to get past a barbed-wire fence blocking my path, I happened to hear what I thought at first was a caricature of whistled wind just at the point where I was about to s
pread the wires and crawl through. The wind, howling in great surges, happened to flow by a pair of low-lying rusted strands that were perfectly wrapped to “sing” (i.e., vibrate in a tonal producing way). Placing a couple of small mics in the grass to protect them from the elements, I managed to capture one of those rare moments recordists are always looking for—one that provides pure illusion and effect without other distractions.

  When I play those recordings, even many years later, I am always surprised by how “dry” and “hot” they sound. The thick, medium-pitched tones make my lips feel parched. I also have wind recordings that are suggestive of cold or menacing feelings—a bone-chilling sound that changes ominously, occurring when high-pitched howls alter frequency and signal a weather event about to occur. Recordings of wind are often used to establish moods in films. The sound effect created much of the feeling and emotion in No Country for Old Men, as well as in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. One of the opening scenes in Altman’s film is a long shot depicting a Western frontier town in winter, the wind employed at just the right pitch and level to set the stage for events to come with a foreboding chill.

  Wind whipping around the globe; water in streams, lakes, and oceans; the movement of the earth; the violent eruptions of volcanoes; storms on land—these elements once combined to generate biotic-free soundscapes that infused a world on the brink of change.

  Around six hundred million years ago, geophonies were the only sounds on the planet, and no living organism would have been around to hear them. But as life arrived, and as smaller organisms evolved over millions of years into more complex and vocal creatures, the soundscapes of the earth began to shift. Joining water, wind, and the rumblings of the planet, bacteria, viruses, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, amphibians, and mammals appeared, each establishing its place within a new sonic order, a world abounding with life.