TEDGlobal 2013
Bernie Krause: The voice of the natural world
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Bernie Krause has been recording wild soundscapes -- the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, the subtle sounds of insect larvae -- for 45 years. In that time, he has seen many environments radically altered by humans, sometimes even by practices thought to be environmentally safe. A surprising look at what we can learn through nature's symphonies, from the grunting of a sea anemone to the sad calls of a beaver in mourning.
Bernie Krause - Natural sounds expert
Bernie Krause's legendary soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry -- along with some unexpected results. Full bio
Bernie Krause's legendary soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry -- along with some unexpected results. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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(Nature sounds)
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When I first began recording wild soundscapes
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45 years ago,
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I had no idea that ants,
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insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses
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created a sound signature.
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But they do.
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And so does every wild habitat on the planet,
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like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me.
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In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests
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each produce a vibrant animal orchestra,
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that instantaneous and organized expression
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of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.
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And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat
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generates its own unique signature,
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one that contains incredible amounts of information,
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and it's some of that information I want to share with you today.
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The soundscape is made up of three basic sources.
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The first is the geophony,
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or the nonbiological sounds that occur
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in any given habitat,
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like wind in the trees, water in a stream,
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waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth.
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The second of these is the biophony.
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The biophony is all of the sound
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that's generated by organisms in a given habitat
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at one time and in one place.
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And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate
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that's called anthrophony.
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Some of it is controlled, like music or theater,
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but most of it is chaotic and incoherent,
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which some of us refer to as noise.
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There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes
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to be a worthless artifact.
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They were just there, but they had no significance.
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Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters
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was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools
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by which to evaluate the health of a habitat
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across the entire spectrum of life.
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When I began recording in the late '60s,
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the typical methods of recording were limited
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to the fragmented capture of individual species
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like birds mostly, in the beginning,
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but later animals like mammals and amphibians.
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To me, this was a little like trying to understand
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the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
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by abstracting the sound of a single violin player
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out of the context of the orchestra
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and hearing just that one part.
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Fortunately, more and more institutions
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are implementing the more holistic models
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that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced
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to the field of soundscape ecology.
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When I began recording over four decades ago,
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I could record for 10 hours
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and capture one hour of usable material,
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good enough for an album or a film soundtrack
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or a museum installation.
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Now, because of global warming,
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resource extraction,
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and human noise, among many other factors,
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it can take up to 1,000 hours or more
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to capture the same thing.
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Fully 50 percent of my archive
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comes from habitats so radically altered
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that they're either altogether silent
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or can no longer be heard in any of their original form.
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The usual methods of evaluating a habitat
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have been done by visually counting the numbers of species
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and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area.
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However, by comparing data that ties together
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both density and diversity from what we hear,
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I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes.
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And I want to show you some examples
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that typify the possibilities unlocked
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by diving into this universe.
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This is Lincoln Meadow.
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Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive
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east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,
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at about 2,000 meters altitude,
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and I've been recording there for many years.
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In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents
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that there would be absolutely no environmental impact
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from a new method they were trying
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called "selective logging,"
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taking out a tree here and there
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rather than clear-cutting a whole area.
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With permission granted to record
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both before and after the operation,
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I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses
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to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings,
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because I wanted a really good baseline.
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This is an example of a spectrogram.
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A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound
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with time from left to right across the page --
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15 seconds in this case is represented —
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and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top,
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lowest to highest.
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And you can see that the signature of a stream
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is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page,
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while birds that were once in that meadow
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are represented in the signature across the top.
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There were a lot of them.
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And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging.
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(Nature sounds)
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Well, a year later I returned,
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and using the same protocols
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and recording under the same conditions,
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I recorded a number of examples
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of the same dawn choruses,
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and now this is what we've got.
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This is after selective logging.
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You can see that the stream is still represented
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in the bottom third of the page,
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but notice what's missing in the top two thirds.
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(Nature sounds)
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Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker.
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Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times
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in the last 25 years,
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and I can tell you that the biophony,
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the density and diversity of that biophony,
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has not yet returned to anything like it was
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before the operation.
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But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after,
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and you can see that from the perspective of the camera
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or the human eye,
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hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place,
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which would confirm the logging company's contention
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that there's nothing of environmental impact.
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However, our ears tell us a very different story.
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Young students are always asking me
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what these animals are saying,
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and really I've got no idea.
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But I can tell you that they do express themselves.
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Whether or not we understand it is a different story.
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I was walking along the shore in Alaska,
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and I came across this tide pool
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filled with a colony of sea anemones,
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these wonderful eating machines,
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relatives of coral and jellyfish.
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And curious to see if any of them made any noise,
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I dropped a hydrophone,
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an underwater microphone covered in rubber,
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down the mouth part,
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and immediately the critter began
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to absorb the microphone into its belly,
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and the tentacles were searching out of the surface
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for something of nutritional value.
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The static-like sounds that are very low,
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that you're going to hear right now.
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(Static sounds)
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Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat --
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(Honking sound)
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(Laughter)
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I think that's an expression that can be understood
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in any language.
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(Laughter)
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At the end of its breeding cycle,
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the Great Basin Spadefoot toad
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digs itself down about a meter under
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the hard-panned desert soil of the American West,
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where it can stay for many seasons
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until conditions are just right for it to emerge again.
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And when there's enough moisture in the soil
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in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface
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and gather around these large, vernal pools
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in great numbers.
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And they vocalize in a chorus
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that's absolutely in sync with one another.
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And they do that for two reasons.
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The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates,
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and the second is cooperative,
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because if they're all vocalizing in sync together,
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it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes,
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foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal.
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This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like
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when it's in a very healthy pattern.
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(Frogs croaking)
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Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park
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in California,
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and it's a favorite habitat of these toads,
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and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots,
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who train in their fighters flying them at speeds
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exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour
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and altitudes only a couple hundred meters
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above ground level of the Mono Basin,
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very fast, very low, and so loud
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that the anthrophony, the human noise,
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even though it's six and a half kilometers
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from the frog pond you just heard a second ago,
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it masked the sound of the chorusing toads.
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You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy
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that was once in the first spectrogram is gone
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from the top end of the spectrogram,
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and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half,
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four and a half, and six and a half seconds,
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and then the sound of the jet, the signature,
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is in yellow at the very bottom of the page.
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(Frogs croaking)
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Now at the end of that flyby,
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it took the frogs fully 45 minutes
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to regain their chorusing synchronicity,
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during which time, and under a full moon,
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we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl
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came in to pick off a few of their numbers.
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The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration
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and fewer flights, the frog populations,
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once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s,
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have pretty much returned to normal.
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I want to end with a story told by a beaver.
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It's a very sad story,
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but it really illustrates how animals
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can sometimes show emotion,
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a very controversial subject among some older biologists.
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A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest
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around this pond that had been formed
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maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
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It was also formed in part by a beaver dam
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at one end that held that whole ecosystem together
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in a very delicate balance.
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And one afternoon, while he was recording,
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there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere
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a couple of game wardens,
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who for no apparent reason,
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walked over to the beaver dam,
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dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up,
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killing the female and her young babies.
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Horrified, my colleagues remained behind
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to gather his thoughts
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and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon,
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and that evening, he captured a remarkable event:
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the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles
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crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring.
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This is probably the saddest sound
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I've ever heard coming from any organism,
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human or other.
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(Beaver crying)
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Yeah. Well.
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There are many facets to soundscapes,
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among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing,
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which I'll save for another time.
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But you have heard how biophonies
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help clarify our understanding of the natural world.
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You've heard the impact of resource extraction,
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human noise and habitat destruction.
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And where environmental sciences have typically
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tried to understand the world from what we see,
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a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear.
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Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices
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of the natural world,
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and as we hear them,
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we're endowed with a sense of place,
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the true story of the world we live in.
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In a matter of seconds,
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a soundscape reveals much more information
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from many perspectives,
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from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration.
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Visual capture implicitly frames
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a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context,
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while soundscapes widen that scope
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to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us.
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And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words,
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a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures.
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And our ears tell us
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that the whisper of every leaf and creature
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speaks to the natural sources of our lives,
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which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things,
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especially our own humanity,
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and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon.
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(Growling)
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Thank you for listening.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bernie Krause - Natural sounds expertBernie Krause's legendary soundscapes uncover nature’s rich sonic tapestry -- along with some unexpected results.
Why you should listen
With a stellar electronic music resumé including work with The Byrds, Stevie Wonder and many others, Bernie Krause is assured a place in the pop culture canon. But Krause continues to make history by capturing the fading voices of nature: studying sonic interplay between species as they attract mates, hunt prey, and sound out their roles in the ecosystem.
Krause’s recordings are not merely travelogues or relaxation tools -- they are critical barometers of global environmental health. His documents of vanishing aural habitats are a chilling reminder of shrinking biodiversity. As he tells the Guardian: "The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it."
Bernie Krause | Speaker | TED.com