A Wild Music

It’s a parched fall here in California wine country. With the state in the grip of a historic drought, Sonoma Creek has slowed to a trickle; insects and birds and other animals have fallen largely silent.

On an outing to Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, Bernard L. (Bernie) Krause isn’t optimistic that there will be much to hear, though he’s been recording the sounds of this place for decades now. The dryness, made worse by climate change, has sucked the living voices out of this terrain. And Krause, a pioneer in the relatively new field of soundscape ecology, has the aural evidence to prove it.

During a minute-long compilation of recordings he made in Sugarloaf in 2004, 2009, and 2014, the soundscape dwindles from lush to almost silent. The voices of the juncos and other birds that make the 2004 section come alive have all but disappeared in the 2014 section. If you look at a spectrogram, a visualization of the sound files, you see the diminishing pattern.

“One minute tells the whole story,” Krause says. “It’s a whole narrative there. And all of this stuff is quantifiable.”

Krause, who turns 77 this month, has spent half his life recording wild soundscapes close to home and all over the world: in Sugarloaf and other state and national parks in the United States and Canada, in the cold reaches of the Arctic and the warm marine environments of Hawaii, in the jungles and rainforests of central Africa and Australia and South America. He’s amassed more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, a smallish archive by today’s big-data standards but rich in acoustic natural history.

These days he’s a man with a twin mission: to find a permanent institutional home for his life’s work, and to get humans, including scientists, to set aside our bias toward the visual and start listening — really listening — to the world around us before it’s too late. Listening, it turns out, is a tough sell in a culture dominated by the visual. “It’s sound,” Krause says. “How do you value something you can’t see, touch, smell, or engage with except by hearing it?”

Krause’s call to value sound more highly is an urgent one. Soundscapes — the collective sounds that can be perceived in specific locales — are under threat, especially those in the ever-shrinking wild. As he writes in his most recent book, Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes (Yale University Press), more than half of the recordings in his archive “come from sites so badly compromised by various forms of human intervention that the habitats are either altogether silent or the soundscapes can no longer be heard in any of their natural forms.”

Nothing in Krause’s early life suggested that he’d find his happiest moments outside. He grew up in Detroit, where his father was a labor lawyer. The family had no pets and little interest in the great outdoors.

Early on he absorbed the message that nature was something to be avoided and feared. At a summer canoeing camp in Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park, a teenage Krause realized how deep the fear ran. He also learned that the natural world wasn’t necessarily out to kill him. “The lesson was, I think, that it was survivable,” he says.

Krause often had trouble concentrating, and as an adult would be diagnosed with ADHD. “Add to that a serious case of dyslexia, and it was a challenging mix to overcome,” he says.

He pursued music in college and beyond. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that he sought out the wilderness — the Muir Woods, a stand of old-growth redwoods protected by the National Park Service and the closest thing to wilderness he could find near San Francisco, where he was living at the time.

By then he’d established himself as a presence in the music world. A talented violin and guitar player, he joined the Weavers, Pete Seeger’s old group, in 1963. After the Weavers disbanded the following year, Krause got into electronic music and wound up on the West Coast. Together with his music partner, Paul Beaver, he helped popularize the Moog synthesizer, playing with some of the biggest acts of the day, including the Doors and George Harrison. (You can hear Krause and Beaver’s playing on the Monkees’ “Star Collector.”)

Hollywood came calling; the two men contributed music to Apocalypse Now, among many other films. Together and separately they were in demand for TV and ad work, and they laid the groundwork for the rise of electronica in seminal albums like The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music.

Krause set out for the Muir Woods in 1968, hunting for material for a new album he and Beaver wanted to do with an ecological theme. They took the name of their album In a Wild Sanctuary from a quote by the writer Ellen Glasgow: “Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.” (Krause would later use Wild Sanctuary as the name for the organization he and his wife, Katherine, run from their home, in Glen Ellen, Calif.; it’s dedicated to exploring the voices of the nonhuman world, a mission they support through commissioned projects, collaborative research, and educational outreach.)

The Muir Woods were a revelation. Krause, still a city boy at heart, ventured out with his recording equipment and a lot of anxiety. “I was still taking with me all that baggage and misconception about the natural world,” he says.

Out in the woods he discovered that he felt better than he ever had — calmer, focused, happy. “I came back a changed person,” he says. Nearly 40 years later, he’s still happiest when he’s out in nature with his recording equipment. “My main reason for recording at all times, even when I’ve gone out on commission for people, is because it makes me feel good,” he says. “More than anything I like going out there and sitting quietly and listening to sounds for hours at a time.”

Go out into the field with Krause and it’s easy to understand why he feels that way. Sugarloaf Ridge State Park is quieter than it should be now, but when you put on a pair of Krause’s headphones and listen as he listens, the smallest sounds come singing to life. He sets up the recorder in front of a stand of flowering shrubs heavy with bees; unamplified, all you can hear is a low hum, but through the headphones the bees’ collective voice crackles and zings. It’s like aural lightning — hard to describe, impossible to ignore once you’ve heard it.

Once Krause tuned in to nature, it wasn’t hard to leave the music scene behind. “I didn’t like the ego stuff and the drugs and the infighting and the jealousies,” he says. He gave away most of his instruments. “When I quit music, I quit music,” he says. “I haven’t touched a Moog synthesizer since 1979.”

These days, as an independent researcher and artist, he sometimes collaborates with other musicians, and he accepts commissions for pieces that feature wild sounds. Last year, for instance, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales presented “The Great Animal Orchestra: Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes,” a collaboration between Krause and the English composer Richard Blackford. This fall, Krause has been gearing up for an installation next year at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, in Paris, that will incorporate some of his soundscape recordings.

But the music industry doesn’t exert a pull. “To me it was less dangerous to work in the natural world,” Krause says with a laugh. “I’d rather be thrown by a gorilla than work in Hollywood.”

He has, in fact, been thrown by a gorilla — one of the silverbacks at Dian Fossey’s African research station, where he spent time recording after Fossey’s murder. He’s got almost as many stories to tell as he has recordings to play. To sit with him in his studio as he roams through the sound files on his Mac is to jump from one far-flung place to another, one animal encounter and close call to the next.

There’s the time he had to use a flare gun to scare off a polar bear outside his tent on the Beaufort Sea, in Alaska. The time a jaguar tracked him and another researcher through an Amazonian jungle at night. The time he was caught between two wolf packs closing in on each other in Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada. The time he riled some congressmen investigating noise pollution in Yellowstone by playing them a recording of snowmobiles at real-life, ear-bleeding volume. Some of those stories he shares in Voices of the Wild and in his previous book, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Back Bay/Little, Brown, 2012). More will be included in the autobiography he’s working on.

Very few of Krause’s encounters with wildlife have scared him. The archive is what he’s worried about; he’s put heart and soul and countless hours of labor into building it and making sure he has all the necessary information about the dates and places and atmospheric conditions and anything else that researchers need to know about each sound file.

“I’ve got 5,000 hours of sound. I’ve got about 15,000 critters identified. I’ve got all the metadata about each recording completely described,” Krause says. (The word “critters” turns up a lot in conversations with him.) What he doesn’t have, yet, is a permanent home for all of that hard work. It sits on hard drives in the guest house that serves as his studio here in the hills of Glen Ellen, where Krause and his wife live in a pressed-earth house that works with the landscape rather than sitting on it. Their place is just down the road from the former ranch where Jack London built his dream house, only to see it burn to the ground before he ever had a chance to live there.

Living with the risk of fires and earthquakes and drought has made Krause even more concerned about the fate of his archive. He doesn’t want to put a public price tag on it or discuss which universities he’s had conversations with. He points out that the archive represents a life’s work, and that it would cost a substantial sum to try to recreate it now — even if that were possible.

Money aside, he’d like to see the archive become part of a global soundscape project that would connect scientists and citizen-scientists in the work of collecting and analyzing wild soundscapes. Decent recording technology has gotten much cheaper and more portable in the past few years, which puts soundscape collection within reach of more people. Krause hopes that whatever institution takes the archive will establish an interdisciplinary center for soundscape studies to explore not just soundscape ecology but also the possible uses of sound as therapy, in design, and in other fields.

Whether or not he finds a buyer, Krause and his work have already encouraged scientists to take sound more seriously both as a phenomenon and as a tool to help assess the health of ecosystems. One of the founders of soundscape ecology, he has worked alongside academic researchers in the United States and Europe, including the eco-acousticians Almo Farina and Nadia Pieretti of the University of Urbino, in Italy. With Farina; Susan Fuller, of the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia; Jérôme Sueur, of the Musée Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, in Paris; and others working in related fields, Krause serves on the advisory board of the recently formed International Society of Ecoacoustics, which will convene an Ecoacoustics Congress next summer at Michigan State University.

Although he does not have formal scientific training, Krause has worked hard to establish an academic reputation. He’s co-written articles on soundscape ecology in journals like Landscape Ecology and BioScience, and he’s contributed key concepts to the scientific lexicon. For instance, he coined the term “biophony” to describe “the collective sound produced by all living organisms that reside in a particular biome,” as he defines it in Voices of the Wild. The rest of the world’s sounds come from geophony (the sound produced by nonbiological natural sounds like wind and water) and anthropophony (the “human din” of the book’s subtitle).

Working outside academe has advantages. It’s given Krause the freedom to approach fieldwork in a fresh way, says Christopher W. Clark, a former director of Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program and one of Krause’s collaborators over the years. Many scientists who study animal sounds focus on specific individuals; think of the longstanding tradition of collecting specific birdcalls. Krause pays attention to the whole chorus. “Bernie was instrumental in pushing on this paradigm of acoustic complexity or acoustic ecology,” says Clark, a specialist in whale songs. “Bernie, to me, has always heard the song, has always heard the music, and has recognized that of course the planet has singing.”

One of Krause’s major scientific contributions has been to extend the idea of ecological niches to sound. “The niche idea is something that’s been around for a while in ecology, but Bernie took that idea of the niche and applied it to acoustics,” says Stuart H. Gage, an emeritus professor of entomology at Michigan State and co-director of its Remote Environmental Assessment Laboratory, or REAL. He sums up Krause’s niche hypothesis as follows: Animal songs and vocalizations occur “in a particular frequency with a particular amount of loudness, and there’s competition for niches, especially when humans get involved.”

Gage has been one of Krause’s closest collaborators for about 15 years, ever since the Michigan researcher had an acoustic epiphany on a research trip to New Zealand. “I decided, listening to the birds in the forest there, that I was going to change my career from entomologist to soundscape ecologist,” Gage says. “I said, ‘I’ve got to go back and reconnect myself with sound.’” That decision led him to get in touch with Krause, and eventually to establish REAL. The lab uses sensor technologies to do acoustic monitoring of ecosystems; the data can then be used to measure environmental health.

At first, Gage says, not everyone bought the acoustic-niche theory. “A lot of people scoffed at that idea,” he recalls, especially because it came from someone without formal scientific training. But Krause has now published enough “that the niche idea is becoming more and more accepted by the scientific community,” Gage says. “I don’t think people argue that it’s crazy any more.”

Instead they’re using it to drive ecological studies. Across the country from Krause’s California home, Timothy C. Mullet is testing the acoustic-niche hypothesis in the field — or, more accurately, in the pond. Mullet works as a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Daphne, Ala. His research centers on the dusky gopher frog, one of the rarest amphibians in the southeastern United States. At one point, Mullet says, the species had shrunk to a population of a hundred or so frogs. Conservationists’ attempts to rebuild the frogs’ population in their home range haven’t met with great success. At one restored pond in Mississippi, 15 years of effort to reintroduce dusky gopher frogs has resulted in only eight egg masses. Mullet’s question: “What is going on at this site that makes it so unsuitable?”

Mullet decided to listen for an answer. He recorded the soundscape at the problematic pond, and at another, Glen’s Pond, where the frogs were flourishing. Both looked like equally good habitats. But at the first pond, the frogs weren’t singing. (When they sing they sound a lot like a person snoring.) Traffic noise occupies the same low-frequency range that the frogs’ songs do; Mullet’s recordings suggest that road noise at the first site fills the acoustic niche that the frogs would normally occupy, making the site a less desirable habitat for them. Mullet is planning to do a more rigorous study during the frogs’ winter and spring breeding season to test his preliminary conclusions.

It makes sense to Mullet that “there are some species out there that don’t just require physical habitat like vegetation but also require a specific acoustic environment.” His work could help prove that. The point is to “listen to what birds and frogs and insects and everybody else requires,” he says.

“If you stop and listen for 30 seconds you’ll realize how much sound there is,” Mullet says. “We’re surrounded by such a cacophony of sound, we just don’t tune it in. But once you go out in nature and start to listen, you start to realize how much is out there.”

That kind of talk would be music to Bernie Krause’s ears.