The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  Later, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, and many others experimented with the textures of human-generated sound. For In a Wild Sanctuary, Paul and I included fragments of San Francisco urban noise—the rhythmic clicks of cable cars’ underground towropes as they pass over the control guides beneath the street, for example. We also used the Doppler shift of buses as they rounded corners downtown, and we incorporated the sounds of war.

  A number of other composers recognized the aesthetic value of selective “noise,” among them the Beatles and Frank Zappa. The orchestral structure of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band could not have been accomplished without the consummate musical knowledge of the Beatles’ producer, George Martin. Under the pseudonym Ray Cathode, Martin had experimented with audiotape and electronic manipulation as early as the early 1960s as part of the U.K. music scene and the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, which produced, among other projects, sound effects for radio. Through this work, he honed techniques that were a perfect sonic fit for the Beatles. Martin brought with him a sensibility to the emerging electronic soundscape, something that the four members of the band hadn’t previously experienced, resulting in the timeless sonic textures heard throughout the album. Zappa generated a masterly combination of sounds on the album Freak Out, directly countering the music of the “flower generation” with a driving mix of urban sound, political and social commentary, and pop and psychedelic arrangements.

  While technically interesting and notable—the carefully chosen sound fragments were transformed into “music” by laborious editing, tape manipulation, and filtering—these experiments achieved only limited cultural acceptance at the time, except for the Beatles’ effort, of course. Far more compelling and immediately responsive to our urban environments have been hard-rock and heavy-metal artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Who, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath, and later groups such as the Art of Noise—also the musical styles of punk, industrial, rap, and hip-hop. As Joel Selvin, bestselling rock-and-roll history author and former music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, told me, “The elements of noise [from those groups] were an important undercurrent in certain styles of hard rock or heavy metal. Musicians drew consciously and unconsciously from the audio clutter of modern urban life—from automobile traffic to claustrophobic city dwellings, from feedback squalls to breakneck tempi, it was all fair game to be incorporated in the bombastic and often frantic music these pioneering rock musicians of the ’60s and ’70s made.”

  Unlike contemporary musicians, our early ancestors would have had only the wild natural surroundings as inspiration. We can certainly speculate about the natural soundscapes from around fifty thousand years ago, the time from which the first known bone flutes have come down to us. And in some viable habitats, where things have changed relatively little over the long arc of time—the remote parts of the Amazon, the Dzanga-Sangha (of the Central African Republic), the jungles of Papua New Guinea, and Borneo come to mind—we can still catch an echo of the acoustic textures of our ancient past. Listening to the archive recordings I’ve collected from these locations over the past several decades not only takes me back to when I made them but sends me many steps beyond, delineating the sonic timelines of evolution. When these ancient voices were first expressed and our ancestors first heard them, the vocalizations were infused with acoustic textures unique to each type of organism, and every voice stood out in relationship to others.

  And each had its primal place. The spectrograms of my recordings at Borneo and Kenya clearly show a well-defined acoustic anatomy marked by very discrete bioacoustic partitioning—probably much the same now as it was thousands of years ago. Looking at things in that light, we see that it’s a bit like uncovering living acoustic fossils.

  In fact, it is possible that we can hear ancient soundscapes even in present-day North America. Kristin Junette, at one time a Montana State University graduate student studying with dinosaur expert Jack Horner, reasoned that, based on the fossil record and the known sounds of insect species still abundant today, we might be able to partially reassemble their individual signatures to get an idea of the basic insect ambient sound as far back as the time of duck-billed dinosaurs—about sixty-five million years ago. So piece by piece, creature by vocal creature, niche by painstaking niche, we reassembled an approximation of a viable soundscape for the hadrosaur. When we got all the parts together, the soundscape turned out to be similar in acoustic structure to late-summer old-growth sites we had recorded in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Then, based on the acoustic physiology of the animal skull, we re-created a representative hadrosaur vocalization that sounded somewhat like a slowed-up recording of a great hornbill—a bird that lives in the rain forests of Sumatra and India.

  Imagine being able to hear what life sounded like in Africa two hundred thousand years ago. According to a recently published study headed by Tim White—who discovered “Lucy” with his UC Berkeley colleague Donald Johanson—modern humans didn’t materialize in Africa’s plains; rather, it is more likely, based on fossil and isotope evaluation, that we emerged from forest habitats densely populated with all kinds of wildlife, many habitats of which still exist today, just in smaller fragmented forms. We have places where mountain gorillas, orangutans, wild cats, lemurs, birds, insects, elephants, eland, jackals, amphibians, and reptiles thrive, and that consequently may still be suggestively radiant with ancient sound, an eloquent sparkle that emanates from the wings, feet, beaks, and thoraxes of thousands of simultaneously chorusing organisms.

  Other studies, like those that address the first human symbolic graphic expressions, suggest that early modern humans populated a wide range of forest, grassland, and coastal habitats throughout the entire continent of Africa. Bonded closely to the natural world, early humans would have first imitated the voices of these soundscapes.

  Back then our engagement with natural sound was exactly the opposite of what most of us now experience in the wild. Travelers and hunters would have found solitude among the nonhuman animal and geophonic landscapes: the creature world of whirs, shrieks, scratches, hisses, bleats, clicks, barks, howls, moans, buzzes, and crunches; the drones and pulses of insect and frog choruses; the effects of wind exciting into action the chafing of leaves on trees or wafting through grasses; the sounds of water gurgling in tiny rivulets or rushing downstream; or the crash of waves at an ocean shore. All day, every day, they would have been enveloped in the soundscape of the surrounding environment, listening as it changed from day to night and back again, or as they moved from one location to another or through the course of the seasons.

  In instrumental music, timing is everything. So it is with the natural world: The day is split up into temporal segments, from macro-time to micro-time. It begins with the entire cycle of the day and night. Within that is embedded the dawn chorus, the daytime chorus, the evening and night choruses. And within those are the spaced utterances of birds, mammals, and frogs. An even finer resolution would be the twelve or so vibrations every second of a single cricket’s chirp each time the scraper is drawn across the file of the insect’s wings. In the healthiest of habitats, all of these sounds coalesce in an elegant web of organized signals that are full of information about each organism’s relationship to the whole. From this ensemble comes the music of nature.

  Humans have a well-established aptitude for mimicry. The French psychologists Henri Wallon and Jean Piaget highlighted the role of imitation in early human ontogeny and partially characterized the human species by this ability. Piaget suggested that we begin to mimic because we want to make ourselves understood, to make our presence known to others. It would have been natural for us to seamlessly integrate these protomusical voices into our lives, which were maturely in balance with the rest of existence around us.

  Emerging from the Pleistocene, wherever we found ourselves, we would have been encircled by wild habitats filled with the radiance and sensuality of natural sound tracks: Seasonal bird and mammal voices joined
with the throbbing rhythms of insects in ancient forests. We listened intently as wind, storms, and water added their own special dynamics to the sonic mix. As a means of protective cover and an atavistic desire for connection, we watched and listened closely as birds sang; insects divided time with regular beats; primates swung through the canopies, intermittently drumming rapid staccato chest “pops” with cupped fists; and frogs chorused their individual and collective ways through the sweep of each passing day. The lyricism of these voices conveyed crucial information about the events transpiring in the habitat, reflecting a range of communal sensations whose significance would have been felt, in turn, by every living organism.

  Humans would have first heard sounds to imitate within the sumptuous tapestry of biophonies. Our imagination and our innate need to hear relationships between sounds would have been first stimulated by the voices of the tropical and temperate forests, deserts, high plains, tundra, and coastal regions, where we camped, hunted, and listened. As I stated in the previous chapter, when a biophony is intact, the distinction between critter voices is clearly expressed. It is a communion of sources in which these acoustic slots have taken time to evolve—perhaps millennia. Through mimicry, we would have transformed the rhythms of sound and motion in the natural world into music and dance—our songs emulating the piping, percussion, trumpeting, polyphony, and complex rhythmic output of the animals in the places we lived.

  But how would we have joined the “orchestra”? Our ancestors’ method-oriented minds would have perceived this elaborate interactive process in which animal voice found an open channel, or time to perform. This would have served as a template from which to arrange our own sounds—made with our voices and early instruments—in much the same way.

  While we were carefully listening, we would have transformed what we heard into expressions that reflected immediate links to the world around us. While imitating the sounds of the natural world, we would have found that almost any object will produce a sound: a pair of hands coming together or striking our bodies in different ways (à la Bobby McFerrin), or banging together different lengths and types of stone, wood, and bone, or beating on skins stretched over a hollowed-out log or an animal shell.

  It is easy to imagine how, in addition to using early percussion instruments to reproduce what we heard, we would have blown air through the hollow of wood or bone tubes to produce a broad range of resonances. A bone flute found in a cave in Germany and fabricated from the wing bone of a vulture dates back nearly forty thousand years. Yet the five holes carved in the length of the tube generate a crude pentatonic sequence of notes, and the V-shaped notch at one end presumably allowed the musician to create various tones and textures.

  The pentatonic scale itself comes directly from the wild, reflecting not only the rich biophonies of the forest but also certain animal soloists such as the common potoo and the musician wren, shown here in Figures 8 and 9. The scale is a noticeable feature of traditional music associated with soundscapes—a five-note musical series generally consisting of the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth notes of a Western major scale. (For a common pentatonic phrase in Western music, think of the opening bars of “Oh! Susanna” or “Amazing Grace.”) The Ayahuasca songs of the Peruvian Amazon, for example, take up the pentatonic polyphonic drones and melodies found throughout forests of the world, which have also made their way into traditional music of Africa and New Guinea, as well as that of the Nùng An in Vietnam; the Sena songs of Nagaland, India; and the Peuls Bororo of Niger.

  COMMON POTOO

  Figure 8.

  MUSICIAN WREN

  Figure 9.

  But the common potoo, widespread throughout tropical Meso and South America, was playing it first, bending the sixth note of the scale slightly sharp in its song, giving it a bluesy feel. (Here the musical notation is transposed up a half step to the key of C major.) The timbre of the potoo voice sounds like an ocarina, an instrument that was in use among the Aztecs when the Cortés expedition discovered it in the early sixteenth century and introduced it to Europe (and which is now one of the iPhone’s most popular apps).

  The musician wren’s whistlelike voice sounds like it is made up of pitched white noise. (Here, the notation of its song fragment is transposed down a major third to the key of F major.) It repeats the same sequence of notes over and over, sometimes with slight variations. 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.

  Both sequences are easy to replicate and would be recognized as musical phrases across many cultural lines. And both species will adjust the note sequence if, for some reason, one or another is not victorious in attracting mates. Each bird is controlling a series of notes, can adjust its song if it’s not deemed successful (some common potoos don’t sing the blues, for example), and chooses the number of times the sequence is expressed. Each structure is unique to that species, and we can recognize several levels of intent: there are the drives to impress a potential mate and to claim turf, and, of course, there is the need to be heard within the context of the local bio-orchestra.

  The idea that human music has its roots in the soundscapes of the natural world has had a renaissance since the 1980s. One compelling link was rediscovered within the cultural expressions of the aforementioned Ba’Aka—also known as Babenzélé pygmies—of the Dzanga-Sangha rain forest in the western part of the Central African Republic.

  Louis Sarno, the American ethnomusicologist, arrived in the Dzanga-Sangha region just before radical changes such as stepped-up logging, poaching, increased missionary pressure, and other seductive lures drew members of the group into the cash economy. With the tribe not trusting him at first, he had to spend many months “rushing” the group’s fraternity—for instance, eating bowls of live grubs given to him as one of many tests, until finally he was accepted as “Oka Amerikee,” loosely translated as the “Listening American.”

  When Sarno arrived in the Dzanga-Sangha, the link between the sounds of the forest and the music of the Ba’Aka seemed so strong that, he realized, without the biophony providing an obvious acoustic structure, their music would not have evolved as it did. Time and again, he witnessed his group break into performances, and the more he became familiar with both the music and the habitat, the more he recognized the mimetic connections between their music and the forest rhythms of the insects and frogs, the solo voices of birds, and the occasional mammalian punctuation—and the multiple ways the sonic structures of the human and animal often reflected one another. Sarno’s many accounts reveal how he came to hear the compelling spiritual, social, and practical connections between the biophonies of the forest and the resulting Ba’Aka music; the biophony was the equivalent of a lush, natural karaoke orchestra with which they performed.

  The wild sonic environment the group surrounded itself with was the voice of their existence since their arrival in the Dzanga-Sangha. It may have been a primary beacon that lured them there in the first place. Describing a performance in an unpublished manuscript, Sarno wrote:

  This was esime, an extended rhythm sequence tacked on to the end of every song in a number of different dance forms, particularly those with drum accompaniment. What esime lacked in melody, it made up for in the complexity of its densely packed blocks of polyrhythm. Each woman had her own cry—a meaningless sound, a word, a rapidly uttered phrase—which she repeated in a characteristic periodicity. Each periodicity was unique. Some speeded up, broke their own beat, went retrograde. Tone hadn’t lost all significance, either—in the array of cries and sudden conjunctions of two or more periodicities, intervals of minor seconds, of diminished and augmented sevenths, prevailed…. Two women elaborated on [these] constituent phrases with improvised recitatives of yodel ornamentations and fanfare formulae, in a mind-bending display of free-flowing counterpoint that would have astonished the likes of Max Reger.

  The soundsc
apes of these Central African forests are dazzling and blissful; the magnificent sonic cross-fertilization straddles multiple species. Lowland gorillas strike rhythms on their chests that are surprising and intricate. Forest elephants forage in marshy open meadows, bellowing low, raspy growls—their sounds more felt by humans than heard—that reverberate over great distances. Black-and-white-tailed hornbills sail over the canopy, their raucous calls and the edge-tones of their beating wings subtly changing pitch as they find airborne purchase and pass in high arcs overhead. Goliath beetles hum and buzz. Red colobus and putty-nosed monkeys shout sforzando alarm calls to members of their groups. Hammerkops, ibis, and parrots pierce the air with their screams and calls. A wide variety of insects and frogs add a constant hum-and-buzz counterpoint to the acoustic fabric.

  One only needs to listen to Sarno’s lustrous recordings to hear the deep connection. Described by him as “one of the hidden glories of humanity,” Ba’Aka music emphasizes full, rich voices and bright-sounding harmonies. The sonorous textures, intricate rhythms, and consonance and dissonance flow from and are influenced by their native biophonies.

  Of course, we’ll never be able to hear the music of early humans—but as I learned for the first time at the sacred Nez Percé site at Oregon’s Lake Wallowa, geophony as well as biophony served as early sources of musical inspiration. We can see this influence in the Sami people, quasi-nomadic reindeer herders from the northern reaches of western Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where wind—that ever-elusive element that is heard only through its effects—whips across the land. Descendants of the first Homo sapiens to settle in Europe—and the only indigenous group officially recognized by the European Union—the Sami create a type of music called yoik, an ancient kind of throat singing that is perhaps the oldest folk-music tradition in Europe. Yoik is shaped, in part, to convey a sense of place through the composition of its sounds. Along with the Sami, Tuvan throat singers from Central Asia and some Inuit groups who live in the Northwest Territories of Canada emulate in their music the constant wind that roars across the open plains and tundra, the strongest natural acoustic presence of their environments. By subtle manipulation of sound’s resonance as it comes from their throats, the singers can generate multiple harmonics that leave the impression of many voices simultaneously coming from one source.