The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  Except through written and performed music, there was no mechanism by which to capture and preserve sound until very recent history—the mid-nineteenth century. The earliest forms of musical notation that appeared in the Middle East around 2000 BCE made it possible to accurately reproduce a series or combination of notes, thus enabling repeat performances. We are able to enjoy Mozart’s music today because it has been written down, performed, and performed again—not because we’ve heard him play it.

  The first actual mechanical reproduction of recorded sound took place in 1860, when the Parisian printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph. It was followed almost two decades later by an invention of Thomas Edison’s. His phonograph system featured the addition of easy playback options absent in the earlier prototypes.

  Manageable technology for reproducing sound from the wild surfaced a few years after the invention of the bias-calibrated analog tape recorder by Ampex in 1948. Based on a German invention developed a decade earlier, tape recorders of the Ampex era were the first electromechanical devices able to capture and replicate sound encompassing nearly the full range of human hearing—all on a thin quarter-inch strip of tape. The recording tape consisted of three elements: a Mylar (or plastic) backing, a very thin coating of oxide, and a type of adhesive that held the oxide to the backing. The oxide was made up of a layer of tiny magnetic elements, each about the size of a single particle of cigarette smoke. When the tape was drawn smoothly across the electromagnetically charged record head, the oxide particles, normally aligned in random patterns, were realigned such that they could be “read” by the playback head and would reproduce an analog, or continuous stream, of captured sound.

  Audiotape in its different forms—reel-to-reel as well as standard and mini-audiocassettes—was the principal medium until the mid-1980s, when digital audiotape (DAT), a transitional format that combined elements of both analog and digital systems, took over. In a short time, the recording world became dominated by digital recording systems, moving from complex, heavy, and power-dependent technologies to extremely light, versatile, and high-quality handheld models. By 2005 field and audio delivery systems became digitally based—whether on hard drive, compact flash, or both—and have remained so to date. Each time I think I have a version of the ultimate system, I’m seduced by a new and better one.

  But even with all the technology to record and reproduce dramatic audio performances, recordists interested in the natural world have not, for the most part, focused on soundscapes as whole structures. Except for limited use in film and television sound tracks, whole-habitat recordings were virtually unheard-of when I began in the late 1960s. Rather, sound fragmentation—acoustic snapshots of solo animals, like those in my nightmare—remained the dominant field-recording model from the onset of the craft. Throughout much of the twentieth century, those of us in the field were charged with carefully abstracting brief individual sound sources from within the whole acoustic fabric.

  The inspiration for sound fragmentation came about because a couple of researchers simply figured out that they could do it. That, and the fact that they were on a mission. After discovering that they could isolate the sound of a single bird by using what ornithologists of the 1920s called a sound mirror—an early version of the parabolic dish—and recording the signal to the optical track of a Movietone sound recorder originally designed for film, Arthur Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg from the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology and a few other colleagues decided to chase down and record the rare ivory-billed woodpecker. In the spring of 1935 this team of birders, mounted on a mule-drawn wagon loaded with hundreds of pounds of recording gear, entered a gator-infested Georgia fen. After the bird and its nest were finally spotted, the researchers captured one clear recording of the likely now-extinct creature.

  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Ludwig Koch was recording individual birds in Great Britain and on the Continent using a device more akin to a Vitaphone—a disk recorder in which the needle records and plays back tracking grooves on the disk from the inside out. The decontextualized single-species model these scientists established ushered in a narrow academic recording format still favored nearly eight decades later. Based on the idea of life lists— finding and identifying single species of birds and mammals and, more recently, frogs and insects—the approach of collecting animal sounds by the numbers became firmly entrenched.

  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 soundscape’s value as a window into ecological and musical literacy first became obvious to me while I was recording in the equatorial forests of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Bored with chasing individual species and hearing single-channel monaural playbacks, I allowed the music-producer training in me to surface, and I set up a pair of stereo microphones and hunkered down. As night fell, I felt enchanted and blessed to be enveloped in that world of 3-D sound. It was a deliverance from the monotonous single-track recordings of older models, and the sound was more illuminating and evocative of a place than was any photograph. 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. They were generated as points of sound transported through the acoustic space. For me, listening with open ears enhanced a sense of extraordinary humility and imparted a sacred gift: a souvenir of living sound from a distinct place at a moment in time. Even now it brings me the greatest satisfaction I know.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Voices from the Land

  Lake Wallowa in northeastern Oregon is sacred to the Nez Percé. It was also the starting point for the 1877 flight led by Chief Joseph and several other chiefs, who, after outrunning and outfighting five American armies over the course of three months and a passage of seventeen hundred miles—with their entire tribes in tow, including children—were defeated at Bear Paw Battlefield in Montana, just forty-four miles short of the Canadian border and freedom.

  When I first saw this idyllic site in October 1971, nestled at the foot of Chief Joseph Mountain in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, the shore was covered in a frosty mantle glistening in the early-morning sun. Guided there for a music lesson by Angus Wilson, a Nez Percé elder whom a colleague and I had just met, we were steered to his sacred learning ground and told exactly where to sit. Then he moved some distance away while my friend and I waited, our interest piqued the evening before when Wilson alluded to the depths of our musical ignorance. Offering to reeducate us if we were at all curious, he cautioned that the tutorial might require a high degree of patience and a suspension of long-held beliefs. We were in.

  Waiting by a feeder stream that flowed from a valley to the south, we squatted on our haunches, trembling—the temperature hovered in the midtwenties, and we lacked proper clothing to sit on the ground without cover. Anticipating an unnamed and unexpected event, we impatiently scanned the valley, where the woods were dense with lodgepole pine, Douglas fir, western larch, ponderosa, and low-lying scrub. Except for the sound of a few ravens, it was, at first, pretty quiet. Nothing moved. Wilson hadn’t said much on the three-hour predawn journey from Lewiston, Idaho. When we got to our destination, he simply asked us to cool our heels and said that all would be exposed in time.

  After about half an hour, the wind began to funnel down from the high southern pass, gaining more force with each passing moment. A Venturi effect caused the gusts passing upstream through the narrow gorge to compress into a vigorous breeze that swept past our crouched bodies, the combined temperature and windchill now making us decidedly
uncomfortable. Then it happened. Sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us. The effect wasn’t a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch. At the same time they created complex harmonic overtones, augmented by reverberations coming off the lake and the surrounding mountains. At those moments the tone clusters, becoming quite loud, grew strangely dissonant and overwhelmed every other sensation.

  While never unpleasant, the acoustic experience was disorienting. The sound came out of nowhere and completely masked the natural soundscape; we couldn’t connect the reverberation with anything we could see. With mixed emotions, my colleague and I looked at each other, puzzled and a bit apprehensive. Neither of us had ever heard of or experienced anything like this—nor had we thought to record in a way that caught the whole event.

  Some time slipped by, and Angus slowly got to his feet, walking with arthritic stiffness over to us. He asked if we knew where the sound was coming from. Bordering on hypothermia, we both shook our heads. Placing himself between my friend and me, Angus motioned for us to stand up and walk with him to the stream bank. He asked again if we had any idea what was happening. Only then did we realize what he wanted us to hear and see. Before us stood a cluster of different-length reeds that had been broken off by the force of the wind and weather over the course of seasons. As the air flowed past the reeds, those with open holes at the top were excited into oscillation, which created a great sound—a cross between a church organ and a colossal pan flute. With that realization came the instantaneous release of all the tension in my hypothermic shoulders. If it hadn’t been for this moment, we never would have given a collection of reeds growing in a remote area by an Oregon lake a second thought.

  Seeing recognition in our faces, Angus then took a knife from the sheath at his belt and walked into the shallows, boots and all. He selected and cut a length of reed from the patch, bored some holes and a notch into it, and began to play. After performing a short melody—one that we did manage to capture on tape despite the freezing temperatures—he turned to us and, in a slow, measured voice, said: “Now you know where we got our music. And that’s where you got yours, too.” Humbled, I realized this was, beyond a doubt, my most memorable music lesson.

  • • •

  Even as animals’ sounds will dominate a soundscape at different times, conscientious listening shows that the geophony— natural sounds springing from nonbiological subcategories such as wind, water, earth movement, and rain—has an effect not only on individual voice expression but also on the performance of all animals in a habitat taken together. 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. Every acoustically sensitive organism had to accommodate the geophony; each had to establish a bandwidth in which its clicks, breaths, hisses, roars, songs, or calls could stand out in relation to nonbiological natural sounds. 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.

  By itself, the geophony is a source of beauty and complexity, and deserves to be explored on its own terms. I think it’s likely that water would have been the first natural sound any sentient organism interacted with. If the fossil records of the first sea creatures—rangeomorphs—found in rock formations are any indication of the origins of life on earth, then the setting for this interaction was probably a marine ocean environment somewhere near where the coast of Newfoundland now lies, as far back as 550 to 600 million years ago. What we do know for sure is that organisms have always depended on water for life. Since water was life’s first home, the sound produced by the medium would have been the first any evolving responsive organism would have heard.

  While I was working in the Northwest along the Columbia River, a local resident told me the story of a nearby Native American group whose communal life had completely revolved around a waterfall—a sound from their creation story. The waterfall animated their lives as a group and sustained them through every generation. When I told the local that I was curious to learn more, he introduced me to the tribal member Elizabeth Woody.

  According to Woody, 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. Each season the wide, vital river at the cascade provided lots of fish—in the spring, chinook salmon; in the summer, chinook and bluebacks; in the fall, chinook, steelhead, and coho. When the catch was good, tribal members could harvest a ton of fish a day. For little more than the cost of a couple of balls of twine, tribesmen could quickly supply both close and extended family with fish for a year.

  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. Although they had been forewarned, the Wy-am elders stood on the riverbank, astonished, watching as a way of life that had flourished for centuries disappeared in less than a day. There wasn’t a dry eye on the banks near Celilo, the small namesake village on the river’s edge. And yet the elders were not weeping for the loss of salmon. They wept because the river no longer lent its wise voice to the community. The submerged Celilo Falls were dead silent.

  “It was a place revered as one’s own mother,” said Elizabeth Woody. “I [now] live with the … absence and silence of Celilo Falls much as an orphan lives hearing of the kindness and greatness of her mother.”

  The world is filled with ancient myths about water and its effect on our perceptions of the natural world, and stories of sounds created by and around water have many intricate variations. By far the favorites of mine draw connections to the human and nonhuman animal worlds, and the geophony. Where large rivers and human populations intersect, there tend to be flood myths—for example, the descriptions of the great floods in the Epic of Gilgamesh and, of course, the story of the flood in the Book of Genesis.

  As humans have traveled more widely, many have noticed that it’s not only the great natural events that have left an impression on our story. We may have arrived late in recognizing the wonders of the terrestrial orchestra, but we came even later to exploring the abundance of living sound in the streams, ponds, swamps, lakes, reefs, and oceans of the world. Although sailors in ancient times occasionally heard the voices of whales through the hulls of their wooden ships, today giant leaps in accessible technologies, combined with an inveterate curiosity, have led us to drop hydrophones (underwater mics) in the earth’s waters, adding greatly to our sense of an element that covers more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface.

  Soundscape ecologists who have recorded shorelines on different continents and dozens of ocean beaches of the world frequently remark on the subtleties of sound that we’ve easily overlooked—and that are just beginning to be understood by those in the field. The water sounds at each beach have their own acoustic signatures as a result of the beaches’ rakes, offshore and shoreline depths, currents, composite materials, weather patterns, salinity, water temperature, climate, season, surrounding terrestrial environment, geological features, and a range of other dynamic components. The offshore depth of the water changes from one section of beach to another, and it affects whether the waves begin breaking at a distance or closer to the shoreline. I am always struck by how the marine soundscape of the seashore at Coney Island in Brooklyn—over its entire dynamic range—is very different from that of the beaches i
n Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean in Tanzania, or Ocean Beach in San Francisco, or Praia Beach in the Azores, or the East Anglia coast of the United Kingdom, or the sandy shores of Martha’s Vineyard, or Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro.

  Until I heard side-by-side recordings made at the waterline of various beaches at slack-water high or low tide, it would never have occurred to me that ocean-shore ambiences could sound so different from one another. Wild terrestrial habitats, yes. But the sandy beaches at the shore? When my parents first took me to Coney Island, where the broad sandy beaches of the 1940s and ’50s caused gentle waves to wash onshore with long periods in between, I was struck by the placidness of the sound. With the space so open and expansive, and with my parents venturing out only in the calmest of weather, I found that Coney Island became a signature acoustic experience to which I would eventually compare all others as I grew older.

  In Dar es Salaam, when the weather is calm, small Indian Ocean waves come ashore from the east in quick, staccato-like patterns—sounding almost like the frequent successive lapping at a freshwater lake. The rake of the beach is at a steep angle, causing the waves to collapse just as they reach the shore. Of all my ocean-beach recordings, no others from a saltwater environment sound quite like this one. On the opposite side of the world, waves that wash up on the few sandy beaches in Big Sur—which is about midway between California’s northern and southern borders—and those on Ocean Beach in San Francisco are far more robust and powerful. In even the calmest weather, their curl and booming crashes give me a contradictory sense of both a stark beauty and an awesome yet cryptic threat.