This interview aired in the July 18, 2023 episode of Crosscurrents.
More than 70% of my archive comes from habitats that no longer exist or have changed so radically that you can't tell that that's the place.Bernie Krause
Natural State is a new series on KALW featuring sounds from environments all over California. Most of the recordings were done by Bernie Krause.
Krause is what’s called a sound ecologist, a field he helped invent. Since the ‘70s, he’s been recording natural sounds from all over the world, documenting their complexity, and how they’re changing.
He has a new exhibit that opened this month at The Exploratorium. KALW’s Natural State host Marissa Ortega-Welch sat down with him to talk more about his work and what he calls the “great animal orchestra.”
Marissa Ortega-Welch, Natural State Host: You didn't start out your career recording natural sounds. You actually had this incredible career as a rock musician in the ‘50s through ‘70s. You introduced the synthesizer to pop music; you worked with Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees, the Weavers. You also did sound for feature films like Apocalypse Now and Rosemary's Baby. So how did you go from all of that to recording natural sounds?
Bernie Krause, Sound Recordist: I was at Mills College studying electronic music. I was introduced to a fellow by the name of Paul Beaver, a recordist from Los Angeles, and a fellow who had a history of doing films like Creature from the Black Lagoon and playing the theremin and performing on all kinds of weird electronic instruments. We formed a team. Paul and I got a contract from Warner Brothers to do several albums for them. And our first album was titled In a Wild Sanctuary. It was the first album on ecology and also the first album ever to use natural sound as a component of orchestration.
I went off into the field because Paul wouldn't do it. He was more terrified of animals than I was, and I wanted to get over that fear. And so off I marched into what I thought was a very wild area: a place called Muir Woods. And I turned on that recorder one October afternoon and heard the sound open up. It was a stereo recording. So the sound completely opened up for me. And I thought to myself, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” It was one of the most calming feelings and a feeling of being alive and present in the living world.
And it was right there that I decided to find a way to change my life so that I was able to do that and find a way to make a living at it because that was the hardest part. And I did.
Ortega-Welch: So you've been recording now all over California and the world since the late ‘70s. I would imagine you're up very early to record the sounds; you're in a remote place;you might be by yourself. Have you ever had any close encounters with wildlife or any any other memorable moments being out there alone?
Krause: When we were recording in Sequoia National Park, south of Yosemite, I was out there one evening and a bear walked up to the microphone and actually enclosed the entire microphone in its mouth and crunched down on the on the windscreen–the thing that protects the microphone from from wind. And so it's the only recording in stereo that I have of being inside a bear’s mouth!
Ortega-Welch: Wait, so how close were you to this and what did you do? What happened next?
Krause: I was a few feet away. I mean, maybe ten feet away from that. I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. It found nothing that it wanted to eat. And I wasn't on the menu that night and off he went!
Ortega-Welch: Amazing! So on Natural State we’ve been playing your recordings from all over CA–a state that is known for all these visual natural landmarks like Yosemite’s Half Dome or the towering redwoods. What would you want people to know are the auditory landmarks of California? What are the sounds that are quintessential to our state?
Krause: Well, they've changed so radically since I began that I can’t really tell you what a healthy sound signature would be now. More than 70% of my archive comes from habitats that no longer exist or have changed so radically that you can't tell that that's the place. One of the key things about the soundscapes is that they are narratives of place. Normally, like your voice and my voice are very different, but also they’re signatures that define us in a way. The same thing happens with the natural world: the voice of Crescent Meadow or Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra is singular to that place. There's no place else on Earth that sounds like that.
I don't recognize the soundscapes of places like I used to be able to do. From a musical perspective, they've all changed.
Ortega-Welch: That's really profound thinking about how the redwoods are still there, Half Dome still there. But still, you're hearing the change. Can you give us an example of a place in California where the sound has really changed over time?
Krause: Yeah, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. When I start- first started to record in the early ‘90s, it was really a robust place. There was lots of diversity and density of wildlife sound. But around 2011, we began to notice the change. Spring was occurring two weeks earlier; it was breaking two weeks earlier. So the birds that came through migrating and expecting to find vegetation, when they landed they began to change their habits, because what they expected wasn't there. And 2014, the third year of the drought, there was very little density. There was almost no water running through the stream. And the other problem was, we weren't hearing the large numbers of birds that we had before. And then 2015, we had the first Silent Spring I've ever heard.
Ortega-Welch: Maybe on a more hopeful note in terms of getting the word out about your work and these changes, you have a new exhibit that opened at the Exploratorium this month: The Great Animal Orchestra. Can you tell us a little bit about it? What do you excited for people to experience?
Krause: The Great Animal Orchestra is a composite of many habitats–7 of them to be exact. There’s a couple of tropical habitats from the equator; there are subarctic [habitats] from Alaska, the Yukon delta; there’s a marine habitat, and so on. I wanted to show the beauty of the natural world with these habitats. My idea of art is to transform these pieces into works of wonder that I most want people to hear and experience in the world. But they're disappearing very fast now. My hope is that people will get outside and listen to these things, listen to the world. The natural world is telling us that we better be careful and we better change our ways pretty quickly. And if we do, I think there's some hope here.
This is something that I bring up often now, and it's a paraphrase of a David Bowie aphorism: “Keep in mind, the future belongs to those who can hear it coming.”
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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