The natural sound expert has been travelling the planet to record and archive the cacophony of the natural world since 1968. Listen to – and get the story behind – seven of his unique recordings.
The following written content by Dominique Lamberton
Bernie Krause knows sound. While he has been in the soundscape ecology field for the last 50 years, the trained musician previously contributed to albums for Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and David Byrne, George Harrison and the Doors. He was even instrumental in bringing the synthesizer to pop music in the 1960s.
So when Krause came to bioacoustics in the late 1960s – he counts Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer as an inspiration – he took a different approach than others. Rather than recording the sounds of birds, insects and amphibians individually, he records the “whole symphony of sounds.” “I was one of the few people who established the idea of recording an entire natural soundscape – a whole habitat – because there’s more information there,” Krause says. The information he records is vital in conservation and scientific study; in communicating how habitats are changing. “More than 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats that no longer exist,” he says.
Through his organization Wild Sanctuary, Krause has recorded more than 5,000 hours of natural habitats, from the Azores to Alaska, picking up at least 15,000 different species. In addition to research, he showcases these sounds through works like The Great Animal Orchestra, Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes, which was commissioned by the BBC and premiered in 2014 at the U.K.’s Cheltenham Music Festival, and a 2019 exhibition at the Triennale di Milano, which paired Krause’s sounds with visuals by London‑based studio United Visual Artists.
For Krause, there’s nothing like being completely immersed in a sound‑filled natural environment: “It’s magic,” he says. “I kind of think of these places that are remote, and still intact, as a church or a mosque or a synagogue – they’re really sacred and holy to me. I can’t imagine any human construct that comes close.” Read and listen to more from enRoute.
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