@book{krause2012great,
title={The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places},
author={Krause, B.},
isbn={9780316192392},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=cds1AQAAQBAJ},
year={2012},
publisher={Little, Brown}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
Each voice can be heard distinctly, so that the animals seem able to hear and to distinguish one voice from another. My ears indifferently heard sound, but they weren’t trained to distinguish the many subtleties of untamed natural environments.
soundscape: all of the sound that reaches our ears in a given moment/
Each soundscape uniquely represents a place and time through the combination of its special blend of voices, whether urban, rural, or natural.
What reaches out to us from the wild is a deeply profound connection—a constantly evolving multidimensional weave of sonic fabric. Natural soundscapes are never expressed the same way from one day to another. The voices that make up these choruses are always adjusting slightly to accommodate for the most successful transmission and reception—a kind of perpetual self-editing mechanism.
For that reason, it is extremely difficult to re-create those choral expressions from their separate abstract parts unless we are able to grasp the underlying infrastructure characterizing how each component voice fits within an ever-changing bioacoustic composition.
Focusing on capturing single sound fragments initially forced me—and everyone else, from casual listeners to serious researchers—to confine my inquiries to the limits of each vocalization, whatever its origin. But for humans, the sound-fragment model distorts a sense of what is wild by giving us an incomplete perspective of the living landscape. And the result is that a necessary link between the human and nonhuman aural worlds is mostly ignored. The captured ambiences—rich textures that infused the entire frequency spectrum with elegant structures, multiple tempi, and soloists—intensified my experience of the habitat through their luxurious and subtle nuances.
The sounds of the geophony were the first sounds on earth—and this element of the sound-scape is the context in which animal voices, and even important aspects of human sonic culture, evolved. Humans, like others in the animal world, were drawn to geophonic voices because they contained fundamental messages: those of food, a sense of place, and spiritual connection.
Elders in the Wy-am tribe tell of a period spanning thousands of years when they fished all year long at Celilo Falls, just west of the Columbia River’s midway point. (Wy-am means “echo of falling water.”) So central were the falls to the tribe that the Celilo was considered a sacred voice through which divine messages were conveyed. On the morning of March 10, 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hoping to improve navigation on the river, ordered the massive steel gates of the newly built Dalles Dam shut tight, strangling the natural downstream flow of the river. Six hours later, the sacred waterfall and fishing site of the Wy-am, eight miles upstream, was completely submerged. They wept because the river no longer lent its wise voice to the community. The submerged Celilo Falls were dead silent.
Like all sentient beings that sonically navigate through the world, we, too, receive a range of signatures. Some contain useful information that we call signal; some feature unwanted and unrelated sound fragments we call noise. Most sound that reaches our ears, of course, contains a mixture of both signal and noise. Those of us from industrial societies are so inexperienced when it comes to listening to the voices of the wild natural that we tend to miss the indicators that tell us about events taking place within earshot. The tempo of the stridulation—or number of pulses in any given period—is based on the ambient temperature, which affects the body temperature of the cold-blooded crickets. When hot days begin to cool down, the pulses the crickets produce are not synchronous. One cricket wing has a scraper, the other a file. Sound occurs when the wing containing the scraper rubs against the wing with the file. Eventually, as the evening progresses, temperatures on the ground even out, and all the crickets perform their wing rubbing in phase—that is, perfectly synchronized.
“Travel along this route as long as you hear the green ants sing, then, when their song ends, head toward another voice (and so on) till you get to the place you want to go.”
The biophony as a whole can give us valuable information about the health of a habitat. Soundscape recordings, if done right, are three-dimensional, with an impression of space and depth, and over time can reveal the smallest feature along with multilayered ongoing stories that visual media alone can never hope to capture. Density and diversity are fundamental bioacoustic indicators when measured against season, weather, and time of day or night. If we can establish baseline recordings for any environments that are calibrated to known and repeatable standards—then the recorded information we gather will represent a collection against which future recordings can be accurately assessed.
The presence of water and food, the climate, the vegetation, the soil conditions, the season, and the altitude all affect the biophony. And all of these combined will help determine the cumulative number of creatures living in a given biome (its density) and the number of species present (its diversity). Then there are the geological features of the landscape, which will bring out specific qualities of a wide range of vocalizations, thus highlighting the unique character of the biophony—the way it actually sounds to the ear, human or nonhuman.
We are discovering that the governing features of a biome’s biodiversity are delicately balanced to the extreme. Whenever a biophony is coherent, or what some biologists consider “within a range of dynamic equilibrium,” the acoustic spectrograms generated from recordings illustrate remarkable discrimination between all of the contributing voices. When a biome is compromised, spectrograms will lose both density and diversity, along with the clear bandwidth discrimination among voices that is otherwise visible in nonstressed-habitat graphic displays. Biophonies from stressed, endangered, or altered biomes tend to show little organizational structure.
Within soundscapes are manifold narratives—encoded stories that expose long-held secrets. Gradually the growing body of my work validated the idea that creatures vocalize in distinctive kinship to one another, particularly in older, more stable habitats. Many human groups have likely understood how wild sound is layered since our ancestors first began to hunt and forage for food. The ability to correctly interpret the cues inherent in the biophony was as central to our survival as the cues we received from our other senses. Through the nuanced textures of natural soundscapes in the thickest vegetation, where sight lines were limited by density or darkness, we tracked prey, determined its location and direction of travel, and imitated sounds that had both practical and symbolic meaning.
If an organism needs to be heard to successfully defend its territory or to communicate its viability to potential mates, then it requires clear acoustic bandwidth or noise-free time to do so. Where disparate groups of animals have evolved together over a long period, their voices tend to split into a series of unoccupied channels. When that partitioning occurs, individual voices can be clearly differentiated from one another, and the benefits of their vocal behavior are maximized. When there is occasional conflict, the acoustic territorial disputes are sometimes solved by timing.
We found that the combined creature voices defined territorial boundaries quite differently than the geographically detailed maps we held in our hand. Margins characterized by the soundscapes didn’t align with the human grid lines or other rational borders we might create. Nonhuman animals don’t understand 100-meter-square grids or, for that matter, county, state, and country margins. We redrew the charts with overlays that reflected these new findings, then plotted a number of acoustic sectors and replaced the square grids with our new boundaries—borders that partitioned the map into amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.
It is likely that buried deep within the human limbic brain is ancient wiring that springs to life every time we reconnect with these delicate webs of acoustic finery—the multiple layers of resonance that still exist in parts of the wild.
When interrupted by the call of a loud parrot or other bird, the wren will abruptly stop midphrase and wait for the intruder to finish before picking up the musical line exactly where he left off. When the rain passes and the downpour eases off in the distance, the forest soundscape returns in a slow, transitioned cross-fade with the added feeling of reverberation, which was not as present before the storm. In the wet forest every voice echoes with extended life and energy.
We have thrown everything at the medium—electronics, mathematically structured scales and composition, logic, emotion, religious constraints, combinations of instruments, indiscriminate source materials (such as sound samples of birds, mammals, vacuums, cannons, city ambience, and banging trash cans)—and yet true holistic connections to the soundscapes of the wild have hardly been tapped as sources of inspiration. Early humans would have had an intimate relationship with their soundscapes; they would have learned to “read” the biophony for essential information. Their music would have been an intricate, multilayered transformation of the sounds they were immersed in—the local creature life as a collective, as well as the sounds of the landscape.
Massing into protected enclaves such as perched villages and walled cities, Europeans ventured less frequently into the natural world, partly because forest resources near villages were being depleted (and were thus farther away) and becoming inaccessible. Their increasing ability to grow and store food necessitated the expansion of fortifications built to repel invasion and theft. “Nature” took on a mantle of myth exaggerated through narratives of its perils—dangerous, child-consuming beasts and dark, foreboding forests where those who ventured too far were likely to encounter grave danger. Beginning around 1200 BCE (when music was first notated), instead of performing with the sounds of the natural world, we gradually began to express ourselves musically—both inside and outside our protected cities—by arranging solo or ensemble sound performances on their own merits. The music favored by the clergy was performed in religious venues, where thick stone walls were designed in part to create the auditory illusion of expanded interior spaces through long reverberation.
John Muir—a hero among many—embodies a paradox that has become a hallmark of how we think about nature: that the wild should be preserved, yet improved upon. He considered the Miwoks to be “dirty” and “fallen” and therefore not worthy of the stewardship they and the Paiutes—who had a hostile relationship with the Miwoks—had learned. By eliminating these “unsightly” Native residents, the well-heeled, educated members of Muir’s newly formed Sierra Club could supposedly improve upon Yosemite’s management. As time passed he came to reconsider his judgment. But by then it was too late.
After being present below the canopy of an equatorial rain forest for a very long time, we find that the tactile, aural, and visual elements eventually unite into a single, overall impression. Only at that point might someone begin to hear the phrases that motivate the nearby hunter-gatherers to begin an ancient chant. Forest becomes a place of worship, and we start to imagine what it must have been like to be part of the creature world.
“To many people now, noise isn’t necessarily an aggressive or alienating element; it sounds more like nature than nature does.”
Sometimes—if the biome is physically uncompromised and only intermittent anthrophony is an issue—revival of the natural soundscape from the effects of an event can take just minutes. Depending on the relative impact of human intervention to the habitat, recovery can take much longer—nearly an hour, or a day, or even years.
When noise is introduced into a soundscape, disrupting the normal acoustic dynamics of a biome, animals tend to exhibit restless behavior. One of the first signs is that they either become silent or, depending on the noise, express fear through alarm calls.
Biophonies contain the acoustic compass we need to guide us along the route of an ever-challenged planet.
We are denying ourselves an experience of the wild natural world that is essential to our spiritual and psychological health—a source of rooted wisdom that we simply can’t acquire from other aspects of our modern lives.
The world can be a very lively place when we aren’t there to proclaim or assert our presence. Leave them alone and stop the inveterate consumption of useless products that none of us need. Whenever we decide to go into the wild, we should go quietly and leave things as we find them. We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that any of us can improve on the natural world by our presence or by what we manage to create. It evolved naturally, selectively, and adaptively over the great sweep of time, through all kinds of trial and error. Bending the natural world to our will and purpose is done at a level of self-inflicted violence that has wide-reaching implications we cannot necessarily see or hear.
More highlights:
https://archive.org/download/elopio-highlights/2024-11-01-18-24-13-The%20Great%20Animal%20Orchestra.txt