The Financial Express (Delhi Edition)
Listen to ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’
Bioacoustician and musician Bernie Krause has spent decades recording natural soundscapes and wildlife calls. His work has now been transformed into 3D renderings for an immersive exhibition
THE BIOACOUSTICIAN and musician Bernie Krause has been recording soundscapes of the natural world since 1968, from coral reefs to elephant stamping grounds to the Amazonian rainforest.
Now, Krause’s recordings have become part of an immersive new exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris called ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’. Named after Krause’s 2012 book of the same title, the show runs through January 8.
At its heart is a work by the London-based collective United Visual Artists, who have transformed Krause’s recordings of the natural world into 3D renderings. Imagine stepping into a soundproofed blackbox theatre whose walls spring to life with what look like overlapping electrocardiograms, representing different species’ sounds.
“It’s way cool,” 77-year-old Krause said last week, opening his laptop to show the sounds and spectrographs on which United Visual Artists based the sound-and-light installation. Higher-pitched sounds, from animals like bats and insects, appeared at the top of the screen, then below them frogs and other amphibians and, finally, lower-pitched mammals towards the bottom, each with a distinctive yawp.
The installation includes recordings Krause made in Algonquin Park in Ontario, where he found himself caught between two packs of wolves; in the Yukon Delta, a subarctic area in Alaska, where birds from different continents converge; and in the Central African Republic, where he heard monkeys. He also captured the cacophony of the Amazon, and whales off Alaska and Hawaii.
“They’re very jazz-like, actually,” he said of the whales.
But the animal calls also carry a message. Krause estimates that of the sounds in his vast archive— more than 5,000 hours of recordings from 2,000 habitats encompassing some 15,000 species—50% come from habitats that no longer exist.
“A lot of these habitats in this exhibit are in danger,” he said. In the forest where he recorded in the Central African Republic, “all the elephants are gone now,” he said.
“Wolves in North America are always under great stress,” he added. “In the Yukon Delta, with the birds, the tundra is melting, and global warming is beginning to take over.”
Krause is a polymathic musician who performed with the folk group the Weavers and helped introduce the Moog synthesiser to pop music—including songs by the Doors and Van Morrison—and film scores. He hears natural sounds with a studio producer’s ear and is dismissive of scientists who focus on only one species at a time.
Singling out one bird in a habitat is “like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the orchestra and hearing just that one part,” he said. “You’ve got to hear the whole thing.”
In 2014, at the Cheltenham Festival in England, Krause and the composer Richard Blackford presented the debut of a symphony composed for orchestra and Krause’s recordings from the natural world. Last year, that music was used for Biophony, a ballet perfor med at Jacob’s Pillow.
The Paris exhibition, curated by Hervé Chandès, the general director of the Cartier Foundation, is the most extensive visual response to Krause’s work yet. For the show, the foundation commissioned an original work by the New Yorkbased Chinese artist Cai GuoQiang, who works with gunpowder on paper.
Cai made a 60-foot-long mural of horses at a watering hole by lighting the gunpowder until the images were bur ned into the paper.
“It’s so amazing to me,” Krause said. “It looks like the caves at Lascaux.” There are also black-andwhite photographs of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, taken by Hiroshi Sugimoto, and photographs of birds by the Japanese photographer Manabu Miyazaki, who uses robotic cameras.
Krause, who lives in Northern California, began to study bioacoustics after working on the soundtrack to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Like many involved with that movie, he said he was hired and fired by the director, Francis Ford Coppola, multiple times. “A lot of people were kind of destroyed by that process,” Krause said. “I got tired of that whole Hollywood scene and I decided I didn’t want to do it any more.”
He also finds the natural world therapeutic. “I have a terrible case of ADHD,” Krause said. “Forget medication, forget therapy—the only thing that works for me is going out into a field and putting on a pair of earphones and listening to natural sound.”