The calls of the wild

This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has spent the past 40 years recording natural noises — individual species, but more importantly, perhaps, whole habitats and therefore the relationship of the different sounds within specific environments.

He has recorded over 15,000 different topographies, and is recognised as a global expert. However — and this is his point — at least half of these ‘soundscapes’ no longer exist; their ancient music has been corroded, thinned out or even silenced by human background din, as well as by the exploitation and destruction of so many of the habitats and species themselves. In this book, he sets out to show us what we are losing and why it matters.

He makes vivid and persuasive arguments against both our exclusively visual response to nature and our emphasis on individual species over relationships. As you read you can hardly fail to become aware, for instance, of how many natural history programmes go out of their way to eliminate background noise, so that we can more clearly hear the sounds of particular species, most often larger mammals. In evolutionary terms, of course, each species comes to make its own range of sounds in relation to what is going on around it, pitching its calls within vacant sound niches, so as to communicate most effectively.

The most helpful thing Krause does is to divide sounds into three categories: the ‘geophony’ (water, wind etc); the ‘biophony’ (animals and plants); and the ‘androphony’ (humans and their effects), though I suspect the latter two are more interrelated than he allows for. As his title suggests he believes that music emerged from the geophony and biophony (this, for example, explains why different societies have different musical scales), and would be much improved if it returned closer to its source.