The Great Animal Orchestra Words James Taylor-Foster
The soundscape ecologies of artist Bernie Krause are made manifest in an exhibition that challenges the dominance of visual information in understanding spatial environments. In 1943 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published Le Petit Prince, an illustrated novella for children. De Saint-Exupéry was an aristocratic literary-aviator who rose to the status of a French national hero following his disappearance in 1944; his protagonist the Little Prince hails from Asteroid B-612 and, upon landing on Earth, presents his unique perspective on the planet, its inhabitants, and their occupations to the author. The narrative gradually unfolds from a children’s book into an allegorical tale about human nature. On his travels across the solar system the Prince meets and learns from a variety of conceited grown-ups, from a drunkard to a geographer. Yet it is his conversation with a fox which has come to resonate in the public consciousness. “What is essential,” the fox suggests, “is invisible to the eye.” The American sound artist Bernie Krause was heavily influenced by the maxim of the fox while growing up in the American Midwest during the 1940s and 50s. Upon reading Le Petit Prince, Krause describes himself as having been struck by the notion of the sounds of the unseen natural world – “The Great Animal Orchestra”, as he describes it – seeding an idea that many decades later his recordings and pioneering research within soundscape ecology would echo in reality. This year, in Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier building at the edge of Paris, Krause’s ambitious concept for an exhibition of the unseen has been manifested for the first time. It’s no secret that we exist in a predominantly visual culture. When it comes to depictions of the natural world, for example, images – static or moving stills – are often considered to provide the most truthful reality: the lens never
lies. We have become accustomed to interpreting the world through frames and, in so doing, the art of careful listening is neglected. John Berger argued in his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing that “seeing comes before words,” and this idea proved both accessible and influential. But by prioritising vision in this way, Berger’s argument fails to acknowledge the role of hearing and the supplementary spatial information it affords the eye. For places that we might never visit, such as the rainforests of Brazil or the Arctic tundra, we are left with little choice but to rely on a two-dimensional artificial render of a multi-dimensional world. In this sense, Krause’s exhibition, titled The Great Animal Orchestra, represents an exciting challenge to the ways in which designers and architects understand and configure the world – think of the emerging art of sound sculpture, or spatial acoustics (an often overlooked craft in the architectural sphere). In this sense, the exhibition represents a test of what it is possible to glean from sound. As a child, Krause was a skilled violinist and a student of classical composition who evolved his conventional musical training when he joined New York folk quartet The Weavers in 1963. He later pushed for (and eventually pioneered) the use of analogue synthesisers in sound recordings and movie scores, influencing the recorded work of Van Morrison to Brian Eno, as well as contributing to the soundtracks of the likes of Apocalypse Now and Rosemary’s Baby. The synthesiser became the most pivotal instrument of his career and Krause was at the vanguard of the commercialisation of the Moog Synthesiser, a machine
Review
which used voltage-controllable modules (in place of today’s digital circuits) to oscillate sound waves as they were played. It represented a significant leap in recording technology: in one fell swoop, a whole new range of possibilities for those musicians, performers and record-artists astute enough to harness them became available. Krause rode this wave for some years and it was during a recording project for Warner Bros – a commission which was released in 1970 as In a Wild Sanctuary – that he ventured into a seemingly silent forest outside San Francisco. Krause connected two stereo microphones to a recorder and donned his headphones. What he heard would prove to be an epiphany of sorts: a cacophony of sound previously inaccesible to him. Krause had experienced his first soundscape and, in that moment, decided “to never spend another indoors.” It also marked his transition from pop-recording and cinematic-scoring to academic bioacoustics and, eventually, the emerging field of soundscape ecology. For Krause, soundscapes (a term coined by the composer and environmentalist Raymond Murray Schafer) are layered and allencompassing – the opposite of, and far more telling than, a two-dimensional still. These orbs of virtual acoustic data are formed of three principle sources: the first – which Krause describes as geophonic sounds – are those which are non-biological, such as waves lapping at a shore, the wind passing through a canopy of trees, or rain hitting a forest floor. The second, biophonic sounds, are those generated by living organisms in a given habitat, occurring at one moment and in one particular place: the collective