The Music of Sound

ARTS&LIFE

EXHIBIT

The Music of Sound

“THE GREAT ANIMAL ORCHESTRA,” ON EXHIBIT NOW, SHOWCASES THE SYMPHONY OF NATURE.

SUZANNE CHESSLER

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

LUC BOEGLY, BERNIE KRAUSE AND UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS

Bernie Krause developed an interest in music while growing up in northwest Detroit, and he pursued that interest through a stellar career as instrumentalist and sound designer.

In the 1960s, Krause performed with many celebrated artists, including Van Morrison, The Doors and The Weavers. With music partner Paul Beaver, he introduced the Moog synthesizer to the pop scene and movies, enhancing more than 250 albums and 135 feature films, including Apocalypse Now and Performance.

Away from stage and studio, Krause ventured outdoors and tuned into the sounds of nature. That sensibility led to the pioneering of an offshoot sound career that has brought him international attention through recordings and artistic installations of what he has encountered.

To showcase a range of his recordings at distant locales — which have encompassed travel to the research sites of Jane Goodall in Tanzania and Dian Fossey in Rwanda — Krause’s efforts are being represented in an immersive exhibit, “The Great Animal Orchestra.”

On display Nov. 20-May 22 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., the exhibit presents specific soundscapes and associated spectrograms (graphic visualizations of what is heard). Each of seven stations communicates an environment he has recorded, now paired with spectrograms developed by United Visual Artists in London.

THE SOUNDS OF NATURE

“For a long time, I’d wanted to create a statement celebrating my life’s work in the field of soundscape ecology (the study of sounds produced by all organisms in a given habitat, marine and/or terrestial),” said Krause, a graduate of Detroit’s Mumford High School and a history graduate of the University of Michigan.

“When expressed through the lens of science — like a scientific paper published in an obscure journal — perhaps a dozen or so colleagues will read it. If, however, I transform some of this data into works of fine art, it exponentially reaches larger numbers of people.”

Describing a favorite segment in the exhibit, Krause turns to the Yukon Delta, a location in

Bernie Krause

ARTS&LIFE

EXHIBIT

Bernie Krause works in the fields to capture the sounds of nature.

The exhibits present specific soundscapes and associated spectrograms (graphic visualizations of what is heard).

Details

“The Great Animal Orchestra” is on display Nov. 20-May 22 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. $12-$20. (866) 745-1976. pem.org. To access website videos, go to www.pem.org/ exhibitions/the-great-animalorchestra-bernie-krause-andunited-visual-artists.

continued from page 46 western Alaska visited by millions of birds that migrate each spring to that biome from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand, a journey over vast expanses of land and water that covers 56,000 miles round trip.

“Bernie Krause’s work teaches us that each animal species possesses its own acoustic animal signature that, like a musical instrument in an orchestra, positions itself both with precision and subtlety within the score of the soundscape of the ecosystem in which it lives,” said Hervé Chandès, curator who worked on the exhibit introduced in France as commissioned by the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Krause, who tells his story in a Ted Talk readily accessible on the web, has information available for those who can’t travel to the current display. There are relevant sites to Google and a readership opportunity through the book The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Little, Brown).

A LIFETIME LOVE OF SOUND

“I don’t see very well so my world has been informed more by what I hear,” Krause explained about his career origins. “I was fascinated with the music guitars could produce and studied jazz with Joe Messina and classical with Joe Fava.”

In the transition to the sounds of nature, Krause produced more than 50 natural soundscape albums in addition to the design of interactive sound sculptures for respected presenters. Among the places showcasing his installations are the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Chicago Science Museum.

Part of bringing his work into the 21st century, Krause collaborated with Dr. Stuart Gage at Michigan State University to introduce the soundscape ecology and the value of exploring natural soundscapes for the National Park Service.

“I love what I do, and I have found a way to share the love of that work with others,” said Krause, who grew up mostly terrified of animals because of allergies and a confrontation with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

“That said, I’ve been attacked by a polar bear when camping and recording bowhead whales on the shore of the Beaufort Sea early in my bioacoustic studies. In the Amazon jungle late one night, I was stalked by a jaguar,

continued on page 50

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EXHIBIT

continued from page 48 noted as being one of the most dangerous predators in that region.”

While his recordings have taken him into dangerous grounds, he and his wife, Katherine, endured the most frightening encounter with nature in 2017, when their California home of 25 years burned down among massive fires, destroying treasured possessions and biophonic attractions along their extended property.

While lamenting the loss of field journals, slides dating back a half-century and a Manouk Papazian guitar he played at Carnegie Hall among many other keepsakes, Krause is grateful that natural sound archives survive.

Over 50 years, he collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural environments including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from around the world.

“During our dicey pre-dawn flight, we came face-to-face with the malevolent eye of global heating and its horrific consequences as we bolted through the wall of fire that had enveloped our driveway — our sole one-way path to whatever life now remains to us,” said Krause, turning to new projects.

Readers can access his latest book, The Power of Tranquility in a Very Noisy World (Little, Brown), which addresses the issue of noise in complex surroundings — how noise affects health and well-being and what can be done to mitigate the problem.

Although Krause would like to visit Israel, the trip would be more personal than professional.

“Most of Israel’s habitats have been so radically altered by human endeavor that I really can’t use the recordings for the focus of my work,” said the former Detroiter, whose outlook also applies across America. “I need to work in older, more remote sites that express themselves as close to uncompromised as possible.

“I think of natural soundscapes as narratives of place and time. There’s a divinity to those collective utterances that speaks to me of the values and wonders of the living world. Nothing, to me, takes precedence. The stories told to me through those utterances are my window into what is Divine in the universe.”

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