The Great Animal Orchestra Read online

  ‘Bernie Krause will make you rethink much of what you know about music. A man whose first job was recording the sound of corn growing in a Kansas field, he has spent forty years listening with professional intent to things the rest of us never hear. He has studied the way ants sing and whales roar. He can track the sound a virus makes as it moves from one surface to another. Krause is David Attenborough without the pictures and accompanying orchestra. He takes us close to the roots of the music and reminds us to stop and listen, not just lose our bearings in noise. It’s such an unusual book—and, in its quiet way, so important. Remarkable.’ Norman Lebrecht

  ‘This fascinating book awakens our ancient ears to the source of all music. Read it, and you’ll yearn to muffle our din—and hear anew.’ Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown

  ‘A vade mecum of ordered tranquillity—a gift that came with the harmony of the spheres, allowing even the smallest livings things to sing love songs in many diverse ways while bragging that they are the fittest and will survive above the cacophony of war. A fascinating book of natural history, worthy to be read in the silence of your own library, please listen to what it warns about all our futures.’ David Bellamy

  ‘Krause always reveals wondrous stories of the meaning of music and sounds of our natural environment. Bernie’s research into the subtleties of animal and insect sounds is unparalleled, but it is his description of the radical changes that are taking place on this planet that really makes one stop and wonder… listen carefully, for the sounds you hear may never be the same again.’ Sir George Martin

  ‘Discover how each species has its own vocal niche in the intricate soundscape of a stable ecosystem.’ Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

  ‘The Great Animal Orchestra speaks to us of an ancient music to which so many of us are deaf. Bernie Krause is, above all, an artist. I have watched him recording the calls of chimpanzees, the singing of the insects and birds, and seen his deep love for the harmonies of nature. In this book he helps us to hear and appreciate the often hidden musicians in a new way. But he warns that these songs, an intrinsic part of the natural world and essential to human well being, are vanishing, one by one, snuffed out by human actions.’ Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder, The Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace

  ‘Bernie Krause, one of the lions of soundscape recording, shares his tales of jaguars, wind, and waterfalls, and how hard it is to capture their sounds. Who knew that the most emotional animal sound he would ever hear was the wail of a beaver after seeing his dam destroyed? Krause has spent decades hunting for those few sonic oases untrammelled by human noise, and at last he brings us his life philosophy. This expansive tale of living amidst wild and beautiful sounds has been well worth waiting for.’ David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing, Thousand Mile Song and Survival of the Beautiful

  The

  GREAT ANIMAL

  ORCHESTRA

  BERNIE KRAUSE is both a musician and a naturalist. During the 1950s and ’60s, he devoted himself to music and replaced Pete Seeger as the guitarist for the Weavers. For more than forty years, Krause has traveled the world, recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. He has recorded more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature, due to encroaching noise and human activity. Krause and his wife, Katherine, live in California.

  The

  GREAT ANIMAL

  ORCHESTRA

  FINDING THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC

  IN THE WORLD’S WILD PLACES

  Bernie Krause

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  First published in the United States of America in 2012 by

  Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Hatchette Book Group, Inc.

  Copyright © Bernie Krause, 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written

  permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 78125 000 6

  eISBN 978 1 84765 853 1

  The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship

  Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of

  custody SGS-COC-2061

  To Kat, to R. Murray Schafer, and to the memory of

  Paul Shepard and Joe Axelrod

  Sonnet VIII

  William Shakespeare

  Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

  Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.

  Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,

  Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?

  If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,

  By unions married, do offend thine ear,

  They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

  In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

  Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

  Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

  Resembling sire and child and happy mother

  Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

  Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

  Sings this to thee: “thou single wilt prove none.”

  Contents

  Prelude: Echoes of the Past

  1. Sound as My Mentor

  2. Voices from the Land

  3. The Organized Sound of Life Itself

  4. Biophony: The Proto-Orchestra

  5. First Notes

  6. Different Croaks for Different Folks

  7. The Fog of Noise

  8. Noise and Biophony / Oil and Water

  9. The Coda of Hope

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PRELUDE

  Echoes of the Past

  It is sixteen thousand years ago, and the plains teem with life. With the presence of the giant armadillo, American cheetahs, saber-toothed tigers, giant beavers, mastodons, camels, caribou, dire wolves, and ground sloths that stand as high as fourteen feet on their hind legs, wildlife is everywhere. Humans haven’t made their appearance in North America yet, but birds in great numbers—including pied-billed grebes, storks, Canada geese, ducks, teals, common crows, turkeys, bobwhites, and dowitchers—fill the air with flight and song, while tree frogs, peepers, insects, and reptiles saturate the sound field with the intricate tapestry of their voices.

  It is the end of an ice age, and the leading edge of the massive Wisconsin glacier slowly recedes to the Arctic Circle. With the earth’s warming, the floral world thrives. Pine, oak, and spruce trees, along with larch, aspen, balsam, and poplar, have advanced far to the north along with low-lying shrubs and grasses. The first signs of the boreal forest have taken root in the Western Hemisphere—it thrives through the cold winters and the warm summers, and it is jam-packed with nonhuman life, whose individual voices coalesce into an intense and collective
symphony.

  In the heart of the young forest, an area surrounding a small stream is luxuriant and green, set under a deep-blue sky with a few tufted clouds; it is infused with the gentle warmth of a summer breeze. This habitat is densely populated with creature life; in fact, at this time, animal life—both numbers of species and individual creatures—is at a numerical peak in our planet’s history. In this one verdant spot thousands of creatures sing in choruses at all times of the day and night. The visual spectacle is impressive, but the sound is absolutely glorious.

  This place conveys a complex sonic narrative loaded with significant messages for any sentient being within earshot. The sounds expand to their greatest volumes at dawn and dusk—a loud-soft-loud progression that would be familiar to modern listeners of many styles of music.

  Animals are hooting, bleating, growling, chirping, warbling, cooing. They are tweeting, clucking, humming, clicking, moaning, howling, screaming, peeping, sighing, whistling, mewing, croaking, gurgling, panting, barking, purring, squawking, buzzing, shrieking, stridulating, cawing, hissing, scratching, belching, cackling, singing melodies, stomping feet, leaping in and through the air, and beating wings—and doing it in a way that each voice can be heard distinctly, so that the animals seem able to hear and to distinguish one voice from another. The only sound louder than their collective chorusing is the howling wind of a great storm, a clap of thunder, an erupting volcano. The sound of water—a nearby stream—is the one constant nonbiological acoustic signature of the surroundings.

  Then the ground shifts unexpectedly; a low, ominous rumble causes leaves in the upper stories of the trees to rustle for a moment like hundreds of muted castanets. Groups of insects and frogs suddenly become very quiet. But birds cry out, abandoning their well-ordered choral hierarchy and scattering in every direction; the air above explodes with the rush of staccato-like wing beats and cries of alarm. Throughout every fiber of each animal courses a sense of unfamiliar danger. Roaming predators steal into view, magnifying the tension of the moment.

  Each organism is enveloped in more waves of sonic energy—great vibrations that come from everywhere—above, around, and below the ground itself. Predators take advantage of the moment to pursue those that are less agile and stunned by the earth’s motion. The dominant opportunists—the lions, bears, raptors, and teratorns (with a wingspan of sixteen feet)—generate thundering footfalls and powerful edge-tones from fluttering wings as they propel themselves into the air and crash through the vegetation after their doubly terrified prey. Then come the final cries of the vanquished, a new message that punctuates the moment.

  The world’s waters—its oceans, lakes, rivers, estuaries, and coastal mangrove swamps—are packed full with fish, amphibians, reptiles, mollusks, mammals, and crustaceans, along with anemones and calcium carbonate coral structures that nurture and shelter many communities of smaller organisms. The ecosystems that rely on the contributions of marine organisms mark every shore. Like the habitats on land, these, too, are bursting with sound.

  The Gulf of St. Lawrence, where that river and the Atlantic join, is home to thousands of species. The typical cod measures six or seven feet in length and weighs more than two hundred pounds. But it can hardly swim any distance without careening into another body, the waters are so vividly heaving with fish. Some bluefin tuna outstrip the cod, with adults measuring more than twelve feet long and weighing over fifteen hundred pounds. Plentiful, too, are the smaller herring and haddock, capelin, salmon, halibut, mackerel, shad, sea turtles, and even tiny smelt. Upriver are the striped bass, sturgeon—individuals can weigh as much as a thousand pounds—and trout. The ocean-dwelling fish supply food sources for the seals, dolphins, and larger toothed whales, while their baleen counterparts rely on krill, copepods, euphausiids, and cyprids.

  Abundant sound is complete across the breadth of this marine environment. Some of the fish create acoustic signals with their swim bladders. Others signify their presence by gnashing their teeth. But each fish species generates a unique pressure wave through the oscillation of its tail fin—a signature sound recognized by others in the gulf, especially predators. With water limiting vision, sound is crucial to these animals’ survival and reproduction, just as it is on land. From animals as small as protozoa, copepods, and phytoplankton to large whales, each species creates an acoustic sound-mark. The world’s waters are saturated with living chatter, sighs, drumming, glissandos, cries, groans, grunts, and clicks.

  Closer to the equator, coral reefs abound and make up a significant living mass. And they, too, pulsate with sound. Anemones, damselfish, three-spot dascyllus, and clown fish; parrot fish, wrasses, puffers, cardinalfish, grunts, triggerfish, fusiliers, goat-fish, butterfly fish, red drum fish, many kinds of surgeonfish, jacks, sharks, snapping shrimp, and black drum fish—each leaves a distinct acoustic impression that, when combined with the others, forms part of a chorus that is set in the subtle acoustic background ambience generated by waves at the surface. Out in the open ocean, the songs of humpback, blue, and right whales are so loud that if unimpeded by landmasses—and when weather and ocean-current conditions conspire to moments of perfection—their voices could circle the earth in just under seven hours. The only sound louder than this combined contingent of mammals, fish, and crustaceans is the raging effect of a hurricane, typhoon, or tsunami.

  The ready food supply in this marine environment supports an abundance of shorebird populations and, in the process, the attendant racket. There is the great auk—also called a spearbill—a stately flightless creature that has long since abandoned the air, given that it is a great swimmer. Nearby ocean-based food is so plentiful that it need not waste valuable energy flying to distant places. Then there’s the raucous ow-ow-ow of the shearwaters mixed with the unique voices of puffins, gulls, terns, gannets, petrels, skuas, kittiwakes, fulmers, murres, and cormorants, creating a din that seems to make each vocalist indistinguishable from another. But it’s a curious deception: these are the sounds of survival, reproduction, and communication, and each species has evolved so that it is heard distinctly among the others—and so that it projects over the thunderous, turbulent sounds of the ocean waves.

  Mangrove swamps—saline woodlands that hug the subtropical and tropical coastal waters of every continent except the Antarctic—pulsate with curious mixes of insects, mammals, birds, and crustaceans. As the tides recede in these Mesoamerican biomes, crabs lose their grip on the branches and trunks of trees, falling with the distinctive plop of a large, flat, round stone into the exposed muddy sediment below. The crabs will return to the trunks and branches when they become submerged again, on the next incoming tide. When night falls, frog choruses swell and bats ping their echolocation signals in order to find edible insects in the dark. Barnacles clinging to the exposed rocks and man-grove roots twist noisily in their shells, causing tiny high popping sounds that resonate throughout the habitat above and below the waterline. Even at night, when the creatures are enveloped in darkness, many voices persist, competing for recognition.

  Glacial ice still covers much of the planet north of the Arctic Circle, even as the planet warms. It’s a cold and desolate place, five to ten degrees colder than it will be some sixteen millennia from now. The receding layers of ice carry with them spores and seeds from the recovered landscape. While these will impregnate the moraine once it becomes fertile enough to spawn the boreal forests of the Arctic’s future, there is not much acoustic life on the surface. But even this environment is not quiet: explosive sounds occur when crevasses—deep elongated cracks—form in the glacial span. The ice mass shatters as it is compressed under great pressure and undergoes periods of melting and snow accumulation, and in addition to the startling popping and groaning of the ice and the ever-present wind and frequent storms, calving glaciers release huge walls of frozen water into the shorelines of rivers, fjords, and seacoasts with a volatile, thunderous burst of sound, the fallen accumulation generating huge waves in the water below. Then there is th
e sound of the glacier’s own movement: a slight, ominous oscillation caused by its relentless progression overland—a slow, creeping sensation more felt than heard.

  Just about halfway to the opposite pole, far from the receding edge of the ice and located within a few degrees of the equator, the tropical rain forests are the most densely populated biological provinces on the planet. Here, too, the vegetation and animal life are adapting to the warming earth, some species being replaced by others better suited to the new climate—but animal and plant life flourish here to an extent that it is difficult to imagine having room for one more species of anything. Rain forests cover nearly 15 percent of the earth’s surface and contain an estimated fifteen to twenty million species of plants and animals. The sound there is riotous.

  Mammals, reptiles, and amphibians—from jaguars and spectacled bears to crocodiles and even some frogs—vocalize in relatively low ranges, while other frogs and some birds warble and thrum in the lower-mid range. Still others—insects, along with more frogs, birds, and mammals—have established their voices in the high-mid and upper ranges. So many creature voices scream for attention at such a high volume, it seems miraculous that any one animal can hear another of the same clan, let alone make out the sound of another species, whether friend or foe.

  The planet itself teems with a vigorous resonance that is as complete and expansive as it is delicately balanced. Every place, with its vast populations of plants and animals, becomes a concert hall, and everywhere a unique orchestra performs an unmatched symphony, with each species’ sound fitting into a specific part of the score. It is a highly evolved, naturally wrought masterpiece.

  Humans, too, are making their sound heard. They are dispersing now, spreading across the planet, leaving behind tangible, visible, and acoustic symbols of their presence wherever they go—detailed pictographs and petroglyphs, bone instruments, hunting and skinning tools, and evidence of larders to store excess grain, which they’ve managed to harvest from early seed plantings. They’re pulling together in larger and larger groups, but basically they’re still hunters. The forest is whispering to them, luring them in and revealing where the objects of their hunt can be found. At this stage of their development, sound-rich habitats are humans’ most significant acoustic influences. The sounds of animal life—organisms from microscopic to huge—and those from the nonbiological landscape dominate the rather modest noises humans generate. They have limited language skills to express what they feel, but they borrow some from what they hear all around them to convey emotion. Perhaps, through their body movement and vocal responses—so evocative of the successful life heard everywhere—these modern humans will convince the other creatures that they are all just an extension of one sonorant family.