The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  With so much of my collection of recorded sound coming from now-compromised or vanished habitats, the archive represents thousands of biophonies that no one will likely be able to hear again in their wild states. (When I began recording in 1968, fully 45 percent of our old-growth forests in the Lower 48 were still standing. By 2011 there were less than 2 percent of those forests remaining.) It is true that a habitat’s acoustic properties change in time. But within relatively short periods (thousands of years, for example) it is reasonable to assume that, all things being more or less ecologically equal and untrammeled, habitats and soundscapes will remain within the limits of well-established ranges, adjusting only for natural changes in climate, weather events, or geological transformation.

  At the end of the last ice age, natural soundscapes likely varied within the boundaries of a dynamic equilibrium in which the peaks of vocal species’ density and diversity rose and fell with the twenty-four-hour cycles of weather and season—that is, animal sounds performed in more or less predictable ways, with the “normal” climate fluctuations of given spans of time, yet always adjusting for optimum transmission and reception within a body of multiple voices, just as they always have. Even in the late 1960s, when I first began recording, I could be relatively assured that when I returned to a favorite spot from year to year, the soundscape signature would be at least familiar. The biophony conveyed a thread of continuity, and there was variation only in the actual performance, not in the context or content. Then things began to change rapidly—mainly in the 1980s.

  The soundscapes of newer biomes—those that endured transitions as a result of human activity—reflect various degrees of order and chaos. But to get a sense of how changes in a habitat might have evolved, we can only compare (because quality recording technologies are only about a half century old) what we think are relatively undisturbed old-growth habitats with those at different stages of growth or recovery. That is, while we can construct computer models that provide some sketchy information, we can’t precisely evaluate the biophony of a biome that is currently changing against how it may have sounded a thousand—or a hundred or even fifty—years ago.

  To get a feel for how a soundscape might evolve as a result of human activity, I’ve generated three successive spectrograms, related only insofar as they came from once healthy tropical or subtropical biomes. This is not meant to be a comparison of actual habitat types. It is only to show, in gross terms, the variations in structural biophonic density as a result of various degrees of human intervention and what we would expect to see if we had long-term before-and-after examples from the same site. Two of the following are from tropical and relatively similar habitats, and one is from a subtropical biome. The first, from Borneo (Figure 14), represents an old-growth habitat at dawn. Without going into creature-specific detail, we can look at the way in which all the sounds are clearly defined and how densely packed they are. The second (Figure 15), from Sumatra, represents a habitat that is stressed by some logging but that is also, from all visual appearances, in a stage of recovery. Note how there is some biophonic detail, but it is much less dense than in Figure 14. And the third (Figure 16), from Costa Rica, shows a habitat that was clear-cut in the 1990s and has not yet recovered. There is no density. Aside from a few insects, there is little discrimination to define any aspect of it.

  Figure 14. Borneo old growth.

  Figure 15. Sumatra secondary growth.

  Figure 16. Costa Rica clear-cut to edge habitat.

  The wild natural world—comprised of vast areas not managed by humans—rarely exists in much of any form now, except perhaps in a few isolated places such as the Alaskan wilderness, the far Canadian north, Siberia, and parts of the Antarctic. It certainly cannot be found now in Africa or Australia, or in the remaining millions of fenced and managed acres of nationally designated forest and parkland in the United States. That said, there are a few large private landholdings throughout the American West that have easements designed to protect both wildlife and wild vegetation—models introduced by nongovernmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International—an idea that may have positive global implications.

  If the U.S. national parks represent “America’s best idea,” as was suggested in the promos for the PBS television series about our national parks, then we have some serious thinking to do. The late-nineteenth-century-managed wild idea that makes up the flora and fauna in our park system was initially predicated on the plan to kick large Native American populations—human groups who lived in a quasi-dynamic balance with sustainable wildness—out of those areas so that federal lands could be developed initially as exotic playgrounds for wealthy white vacationers. In the last century, several federal and state government land-management agencies, particularly in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, mandated the elimination of key predator species—wolves, for instance—partly out of fear that visitors would become prey.

  These managed environments, though treasured for their many unspoiled vistas, are hardly recipes for wildness. Wildness is not managed, and it’s not marked with signage, or well-kept trails, or detailed maps, or gift shops selling mugs and T-shirts, or eager interpretive naturalists explaining the intimate habits of elk or grizzlies. As the author Jack Turner assures us, the wild exists when we find ourselves in places where we can walk steadily in one direction for a week without hitting a road or fence—as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example—where we are one-on-one with and alert to the nonhuman creature and floral world in all its forms, and where we are made alive by the awareness of our solitude. Of course, that’s difficult to do in the Lower 48, where 83 percent of the land area is located within two-thirds of a mile from a road.

  In order to hear the wild biophonic world, we need to get to places free from human noise. I don’t mean sites that are silent. If they were, we wouldn’t hear anything at all. Few places are completely and naturally sound-free—and you don’t want to spend too much time where they do exist. In most habitats—even inside a remote house, for example—there is some detectable level of ambient sound that provides us with a sense of orientation. It’s an acoustic reference that many of us need in order to feel comfortable.

  Almost no sentient creature can thrive in a completely silent environment. Silence implies sensory deprivation. Consider, for example, an anechoic chamber—usually a small room a few hundred square feet in size and designed to be dead silent with no reverberation. These highly controlled environments are typically used to test the noise characteristics of very high-end microphones and speaker systems. If you ever find yourself inside one, try to remain calm for more than a few minutes without experiencing the onset of a mental breakdown.

  Once, while on assignment, I accidentally stumbled across a nearly anechoic location at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was the quietest place I’ve ever been in the natural world—a remote box canyon with high sandstone walls about a mile in from the river. I had hiked there and set up camp one afternoon. Resting quietly for a moment, I quickly realized that all I could hear was the blood coursing through my veins; a low-level pulsing thud at one end of the spectrum and a whine I had never heard before at the other, probably from a nascent case of tinnitus; and my own rustling as I scouted for a place to put my bedroll. For a moment, I thought I’d lost my hearing. When I checked a sound-level meter to test for ambient levels, its screen registered the lowest level it could read—bottoming out at 10 dBA—dead quiet. After a short period, I became so disoriented by the complete silence that I started to talk and sing to myself and throw rocks at the canyon walls just to hear some kind of sound other than the blood in my head and the growing internal din in my ears. I was being driven insane by the lack of any acoustic cues. It didn’t take long before I packed up my gear and moved back within the welcome earshot of the river, where the distant moving water provided an acoustic point of orientation.

  Tranquillity, on the other hand, signifies something very different and is a fund
amental condition healthy organisms need in order to feel physically and mentally vigorous. Speaking from experience, Chris Watson, formerly a musician and now a leading BBC natural world recordist, suggests that we crave locations and times where we can find this sense of tranquillity—a point of serenity much more subtle than what silence implies. It is that audible transition zone, an acoustic ecotone between measurable soundscape and dead quiet—one that affects our emotional brain and psychologically guides us to a sense of sheer peacefulness.

  For a radio program he coproduced for BBC Four titled A Small Slice of Tranquillity, Watson spent some time investigating the nature of acoustic tranquillity, asking whether it’s a state of mind or an actual place. Wanting to know how people thought about the concept, he visited a museum exhibit where the sounds of a pregnant woman’s womb were represented, showing how a sixteen-week-old fetus might experience the sonic environment of heartbeats and pumping blood while immersed in amniotic fluid. Watson’s further investigations, involving medical practitioners and psychologists, confirmed that there were certain sounds—such as breathing, footsteps, a heartbeat, birdsong, crickets, lapping waves, and flowing streams—that people described as tranquil. Researchers demonstrated that such sounds stimulate the limbic system in the brain, resulting in the release of endorphins and a feeling of serenity. Watson eventually concluded that tranquillity refers to a basic layer of sound—an elemental acoustic foundation—upon which we can rest our mental processes. The content of that base sound is akin to the impression of hearing the rhythmic patterns of rain on a roof. It’s nearly always a muted but harmonically rich low level of ambience.

  Since the Pleistocene, the human world has found within these special whispers a measure of quietude. As Watson points out, these are not soporifics but rather stimulating points of sonic light. They enable us to think clearly; there is a direct physical stimulus and a measurable clinical effect. In fact, the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), founded in 1926, devoted itself to these places, promoting a “sustainable future” for the English countryside. A “tranquil zone” was later defined by the CPRE as “anywhere that lies at least 4 km [about 2.5 miles] from a large power station, 3 km from a major motorway, major industrial area or large city, 2 km from other motorways, trunk roads or smaller towns, 1 km from busy local roads carrying more than 10,000 vehicles per day or the busiest main-line railways. It should also lie beyond the interference of civil and military aircraft.” In addition, one of the criteria was the ability to turn 360 degrees and not have any visual interference from power lines or buildings.

  In the 1960s there were still about forty places in the U.K. that one could visit and not hear any man-made noise, but with incessant development, the sites rapidly began to disappear. About five years into this century, the CPRE began to produce color-coded maps of tranquillity, which were used frequently by hikers, campers, cyclists, and those with their feet close to the ground. Now Watson is able to find and record only a couple of tranquil spots in the United Kingdom. He is dismayed at the price we pay as a society for the loss of tranquillity. He does tell, however, of one of his favorite uninhabited recording spots—in Northumberland, along the English-Scottish border—that until about four hundred years ago was heavily populated by thousands of testosterone-endowed humans. An area once settled by the Border Reivers (from which, because of their violent history, the word bereaved is derived), it is now all but abandoned—a place transformed back to its wild origins, soundscape and all. It’s an open area with no inhabitants—a habitat where Watson can record for hours without ever hearing or seeing another human.

  In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv wrote: “Not that long ago, the sound track of a young person’s days and nights was composed largely of the notes of nature. Most people were raised on the land, worked the land, and were often buried on the same land. The relationship was direct.”

  Though the landscape of my earliest years was in a state of transition from rural to urban, the sound track Louv speaks of—the soundscape burned into this child’s brain seven decades ago—still resonates clearly. When we fine-tune our listening neurons early on, the skill and openness to the experience—like riding a bicycle or swimming—tend to stay with us, especially if we dust them off every now and then. While I was always mysteriously drawn to a sense of the wild, I did not have or make many opportunities to reconnect with it until I was nearly thirty years old. By then, my listening capabilities, although intact, were weakened from idleness and the peer and academic pressures that had led me from wild sound to the limits of more formalized music. I was further distracted by the presence and force of city soundscapes and the emerging music-industry technologies that were terribly seductive. With the synthesizer and my entry into the music world of Hollywood, I became part of a system—a rarefied circle of artists, studio musicians, and producers—in which everyone I knew was a willing captive. For a while, the money came in almost effortlessly. The ego got some solid affirmation. Yet the undercurrent of peaceful resonance from my early days was buried under a garbage pile of noise, only to be restored the moment I stepped outside into that Marin forest some forty years ago and switched on a recorder.

  The ecologist Paul Shepard went so far as to speculate that the acoustic properties of primal landscapes might be encoded in our DNA. He imagined that possibility long before the genome had been mapped, and he believed that soundscapes, like all classes of sound, are received by us physically and would become, over time, innate. He, too, suggested that a live connection to the natural soundscapes of the world remains vital to our emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being. In this case, to emulate is to honor.

  Vestiges of this genetic connection are buried deeply; over the course of our many discussions together, R. Murray Schafer has suggested that each of us is emotionally and physically drawn to a particular type of natural soundscape that surfaces at different times in our lives. Some of us are attracted to the sound of waves at ocean or lakeside beaches. Others tend toward riparian sites—streams flowing through wooded areas. Still others are beguiled by the subtle wind and the chatter of creature voices of the High Deserts or mountainous alpine regions of the world. And, to be sure, there are those who are lured to different types of music or to the web of metropolitan chaos, where lively “action” and purpose are signaled by noise. We each have within us what I refer to as totem soundscapes, which are expressed when we look in the mirror or turn to our mates to open a dialogue about a spot for a respite from our daily routines. Like the choices I made after my first day of recording in the woods, I tend to think that our limbic wild brains, otherwise pretty subdued, instinctively lead many of us to make some decisions in our lives—unconsciously, in a knee-jerk fashion—on the basis of sound.

  As an eighteen-year-old, I never could have imagined the course my life would take. By now I have spent well more than half a lifetime recording the sounds of living organisms and natural habitats. For me, there is not a richer or more engaging endeavor. Nothing more exquisite. Nothing more healthful. Nothing more revealing about our relationship to wildness. Since each habitat expresses itself with a uniquely structured voice, I think of all of them as rich libraries of musical scores from which the entirety of “nature” performs for its own sake.

  The natural world’s collective voice represents the oldest and most beautiful music on the planet. But wild soundscapes aren’t delivered in an instant—and if we’re to hear them at all, they require careful attention and reverence.

  Many people simply cannot stand being “in the country” (let alone in true wildness) and away from urban ambience. My wife, Kat, and I offer a vacation rental cottage on our property in Sonoma Wine Country, and a few years ago a young couple from New York City checked in for a restful late-summer weekend—an expectation most of our guests find thoroughly fulfilled. As I left the house at about six thirty the next morning—a spectacular warm and bright day—for
a quiet run through the woods, I saw our guests, fully dressed, luggage piled at the bottom of the stairs, loading their car in the parking area and looking quite anxious. “What’s wrong?” I asked, shocked to see them hustling to leave. “It’s too quiet here,” the female weighed in, a note of apprehension in her voice. “We couldn’t sleep, and even with all the windows closed, all we could hear were those damned crickets. So we’re checking out and going to San Francisco, where we’ve reserved a room downtown, right in the middle of everything.” (Since that episode I’ve added to our collection of urban soundscape CDs, which are next to the guest bed, a series of recordings from New York, Chicago, Lisbon, Paris, and a couple of L.A. freeways.)

  Many obstacles stand in the way of our engagement with the natural world. Walking a wooded trail near our house on the morning of the day I wrote this paragraph, I found the spring dawn chorus especially enchanting. Yet there was a spandex-clad thirtysomething woman on the path, cell phone hard to her ear, her distracted body language suggesting that she was completely oblivious to the world she was navigating and to the sound track performing for her. I felt bad about what she missed during that beautiful moment.

  Though a number of studies, many funded by the gaming and high-tech industries, have indicated improvements in concentration and cognitive skills through engagement with the Internet and gamelike software, other more recent observations, such as those by the tech author Nicholas Carr, point to another conclusion—one that many of us have been sensing for some time. Indeed, stress and fatigue are measurable side effects of constant engagement with our technologies. In a New York Times article on the effects of technology and the counterproductiveness of its excesses, the journalist Matt Richtel described how the same distractions as those noted by Carr shatter our connections to the living world around us and even to members of our own families. Although the premise and conclusions of the article are debatable, data do suggest that our powers of concentration are seriously impaired precisely because of our drive for vast amounts of quickly delivered information, rendering us incapable of engagement with larger, more complex issues, while at the same time addicting us to such delivery systems and the levels of attention they demand.