As an artist and naturalist, I have long been intrigued by the ways in which night time hunters from non-industrial societies determine types, numbers, and condition of game and other creatures hundreds of meters distant through dark undergrowth by sound where nothing appears to the Western eye or our untrained ear to be especially distinct. It is astounding how closely their music reflects the complex rhythms, polyphonies and sonic textures of the habitats where they live and hunt. Unlike these highly sophisticated groups, we are primarily a visual culture; no longer connected spiritually or aesthetically to what the wild natural can tell us through sound. As a consequence, we've lost a certain aural acuity once central to the dynamic of our lives, profoundly impacting our view of the natural world as abstract and distorted. For me, some insight into our ancient aural past began to unfold about 30 years ago.
While working with the Nez Perce in Idaho and central Washington in the late '60s and early '70s recording oral histories, music and natural sound, many of the elders wishing to have their traditions preserved generously allowed us to record their stories. Exchanges of family histories between me and my hosts played an important role in first establishing mutual trust over a period of many months. One member we interviewed, a tribal elder named Angus Wilson, suddenly became very pensive and quiet one afternoon when I told him, among other familial and personal revelations, that I was a musician. "You white folks know nothing about music," he blurted out, half serious, half teasing me with a confrontation unusual in his culture. "But I'll teach you something about it if you want."
Early the next morning we drove from Lewiston to Lake Wallowa, one of the many campsites in northeastern Oregon where Chief Joseph and his small band of Nez Perce lived and hunted for many centuries prior to 1877 when they were finally defeated after out-running five American armies for several months. Wilson led my colleague and me to the bank of a small stream, the east fork of the Wallowa River flowing into the southern end of the lake, and motioned for us to sit quietly on the ground. In the chilled October mountain air we sat in fetal positions trying to keep ourselves warm for the better part of an hour, every now and then glancing in the direction of Angus, who sat stoically and motionless upstream about 50 feet away. For a long while, except for a few jays and ravens, nothing happened. After what seemed like a very long period, a slight breeze coming from up the valley began to stir the branches of some of the aspen and fir trees. Suddenly, from nowhere, the whole forest burst into a cathedral of sound! Like a huge pipe-organ with all stops out, a huge cacophonous chord seemed to echo from everywhere throughout the valley. Angus, seeing the startled look on our faces, walked slowly in our direction and said, "Do you know what makes the sound, yet?" "No," I answered, shivering and irritated. "I haven't the slightest idea." Without another word, he walked over to the bank of the stream and, kneeling low to the water's edge, pointed to the different length reeds that had been broken by the wind and the weight of newly formed ice. Removing a hunting knife from the leather sheath hanging from his belt, Angus cut one of the reeds at the water line, whittled some holes and without tuning the instrument, brought it to his lips and began to play a melody. After a long while he stopped and said with quiet assurance, "This is how we learned our music."
It wasn't until ten years later, while recording in the forests of eastern Kenya that the chilly morning at Lake Wallowa with Angus Wilson came to mind again. I had been recording, working long hours over many evenings around Governor's Camp waiting for some grazing elephants to stop pulling up the trees around our tent and render some vocalizations so I could go to sleep. Exhausted from the heat and lack of sleep, I began to experience the early morning insect sounds and distant hyenas as a kind of animal symphony. As this was happening, many thoughts occurred to me all at once as the puzzle began to coalesce into a clearer pattern. I gradually became conscious of the possibility that this wasn't an illusion and began to record the ambiance to see if I would feel the same way later on when I replayed the sound.
Since the end of the 19th century, researchers in the natural sciences have focused research in large part on the study of single creatures in an effort to understand an organism's connection to the whole environment. This research is based on the assumption that isolated studies are always easier to grasp and measure within the canons of pure and carefully considered academic terms--that once the part is understood, the whole can be extrapolated. Study controls are easier to impose. And quantified results offer models that fit common expectations--at no little cost to comprehensive knowledge, however. Indeed, even in the relatively new field of bio-acoustics (bio=life, acoustics=sound) where feasible recording technology first emerged in the late '60s, field researchers enthusiastically recorded single creature sounds and isolated individual animal vocalizations only to find that significant parts of the messages eluded them altogether. It is what Stephen Jay Gould calls "the invisibility of larger contexts caused by too much focus upon single items, otherwise known as missing the forest through the trees."[1] Indeed, we have a great deal of difficulty grasping the larger, more complex concepts--even when they may hold the key to simpler truths. Bearing this in mind, we are just now beginning to realize the important role ambient sound plays in our environment. It tells the creature story in a very different way. From my perspective, abstracting the voice of a single creature from a habitat and trying to understand it out of context is a little like trying to comprehend an elephant by examining only a single hair at the tip of its tail (before cloning, of course).
Our ancestors had intimate knowledge of what successfully guides many forest inhabitants today. It is the knowledge that in every biome of the wild natural, where the environment is still completely intact, the voice made up of the complex relationship between all vocal creatures is quite unique. All sound-producing organisms generate sounds that fit uniquely into their environment relative to other vocal or sound-creating organisms in that territory. These organisms, when vocalizing, produce niches measurable by time and/or frequency. Furthermore, they have evolved sound-generating communication mechanisms which create audio output complementary and relative to other noise-producing creatures and the particular acoustical properties of their respective habitats. From what we can tell, this phenomenon occurs in every type of habitat on the planet--marine and terrestrial. What is especially interesting is the way in which the niche sound changes as one moves short distances throughout a forest--even where vegetation appears to remain the same. While there are general or regional similarities, subtle changes in the mix of creatures change the manner in which the niche articulates itself.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 show simple and complex habitat ambient niches where consistent dark lines running horizontally across the page represent a unique mixture of insect voices shown occupying several "bands" of a 20-10,000 Hertz frequency spectrum in Figure 1 and a 20-20kHz. spectrum in Figure 2. The darker the line, the greater the amplitude in that particular range. The short lines toward the bottom of the page in Figure 1 represent the low voice of a Zenaida dove (Zenaida macroura), a species of bird living in the Virgin Islands on St. Maarten. This sample was taken on Pic Paradis, a 400m mountain on the French side. The Figure 2 sample was recorded recently in Borneo. Again, the consistent horizontal lines running across the middle of the page represent insect voices. However, notice the Asian Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone paradisi) vocalizations at both the left and right sides of the page. Its voice is made up of three harmonic components called formants. And they fit uniquely and exactly into several niches where there is little or no vocal energy represented by the light or white spaces. It turns out that in every unaltered habitat we have recorded, many birds, mammals and amphibians find and learn to vocalize in acoustical niches unimpeded by the voices of less mobile creatures such as near-ranging insects.
When examined from this perspective, territory is now defined in dimensions well beyond the 3-D topographical one might experience on a map. Furthermore, examining habitats from an aural perspective may allow us to actually date them in time. For instance, in younger environments, birds and mammals seem to occupy only one niche at a given moment. However, in older environments, some tropical rainforest animal vocalizations, like the Asian Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone paradisi) in Figure 2, are so highly specialized that their voices occupy several niches of the audio bio-spectrum at the same time, thus laying territorial claim to several audio channels. This must have taken a particularly long time to develop.
Furthermore, these types of observations may be able to reveal a great deal more about the ways in which birds respond to the sounds of their environment. For example, not a few migrating eastern American warblers, able to learn only one song and call in their lives, find themselves unable to adjust to the changes in ambient sound when they fly to their disappearing Caribbean Latin American winter nesting grounds. Where these environments have been deforested, and when birds try to move to nearby and ostensibly similar or secondary growth habitats, they sometimes discover that they are unable to be heard. Our recordings are beginning to show a strong likelihood that survival might be impaired because territorial and/or gender related communications are masked.
To obtain these recordings we typically spend 500 hours on site to get 15 minutes of usable material...a ratio of 2,000:1. The long wait is due primarily to the introduction of human-induced mechanical noise(s) like chain saws (from 20 miles away), aircraft, motorized riverboats, etc. Mechanical noise is endemic and nearly universal. It has become so virulent that we are now beginning to include it as a component of niche studies to see how it affects creature voices.
After my experience in Kenya, the recording of ambient sound as a field endeavor became more prevalent. Partially, out of boredom during these long waits for events to occur, we typically recorded pure ambient sounds to give ourselves something to do. However, more and more, the discovery that there is an animal orchestra with each creature vocalizing in its own niche began to emerge in my mind as I found distinct patterns wherever I worked. I noticed that when a bird sang or a mammal or amphibian vocalized, the voices appeared to fit in relation to all of the natural sounds of the immediate environment in terms of frequency and prosody (rhythm). I refer to this combination of creature voices as a "biophony." Over a number of years I would return to the same sites only to find, when the recordings were analyzed, that each place showed incredible bio-acoustic continuity--much like we would expect to find from fingerprint matching. The bird, mammal and frog vocalizations we recorded all seemed to fit neatly into their respective niches. And the biophonies from each of these locations all remained the same (given time of year, day, and weather patterns) no matter where we worked. The sounds of each of these zones are so unique and important to creature life in a given location, if one creature stops vocalizing, another immediately joins the chorus to keep that acoustical system intact.
Here's an interesting note: from what I have just begun to see, it appears that ancient human beings learned well the lessons imparted by natural sounds. Their lives depended as much (if not more) on their ability to hear and understand the biophonies imparted by their surroundings as those given by visual cues. Small enclaves like the Jivaro and other tribes of the Amazon Basin survive using this information today as do the Bayaka of the Central African Republic. Not only can these extraordinary forest-dwellers distinguish one creature sound from another but they recognize the subtle differences in sound between the various mini-habitats (as small as 20 sq. meters) in a forest, even when these localities appear to have visually identical biological and geological components. More likely than not, even when traveling in total darkness, these travelers seem to determine their exact location simply by listening. Furthermore, when we closely observe the effects of chimpanzees, mountain gorillas and orangutans pounding out complex rhythms on the buttresses of rainforest trees, we cannot help but be struck by the articulation of the message, its effect on other groups of primates in the vicinity of the sounds, and the natural origins of the human art of drumming and making music--particularly when combined with the rest of the forest sounds.
Experienced musical composers know that in order to achieve an unimpeded resonance the sound of each instrument must have its own unique voice and place in the spectrum of events being orchestrated. All too little attention has been paid to the possibility that insects, birds and mammals in any given environment have been finding their aural niche since the beginning of time...and much more successfully than we might have imagined. Indeed, combining an audition with a print-out of the diversity and structure of natural sounds from a rainforest graphically demonstrates very special relationships of many insects, birds, mammals, and amphibians to each other. A complex vital beauty emerges that the best of sonic artists in Western culture have yet to achieve. Like the recent acknowledgment that medicine owes much to rainforest flora, it is my hunch that the development of our sound arts owes at least as much to the "noise" of our natural environments.
I believe that this newly discovered evidence points to the roots of ancient musical composition...something which has evolved over time and from which ancient human beings learned some pretty complex formulae. One only needs to hear the compelling music of the Bayaka (Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the BaBenzele Pygmies, by Louis Sarno, Ellipsis Arts, 1996), to hear the connection.
(I note in the postscript to that book/CD that, for those living in the rainforests of the world, the creature ambiance has served as their major communication influence--their radio, TV, CD and Walkman cassette. Many use these sounds as an animal karaoke orchestra to which they perform. Not only have the rhythms from chimps pounding on the buttresses of fig trees inspired the drum, but frog rhythms in different habitats have also spurred the use of complex time patterns, and lead melody lines have been influenced by bird song and certain mammals.)
If, as I am suggesting, the ambient sound of primary growth habitats functions much as a modern day orchestra with each creature voice occupying its own place on the environmental music staff relative to frequency, amplitude, timbre, and duration of sound, then there may also be a clear acoustical message being sent as to the biological integrity of these sites.
Research continues on the issues suggested by this hypothesis. The study of acoustic ecology begun in the late '70s with R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax is currently being considered as a valuable tool for defining the health of both marine and terrestrial habitats around the world. Adding this information to our general body of knowledge is important for many reasons, not the least of which is rediscovery of a direct cultural link to our natural surroundings before they all disappear. For the past several centuries, at an ever-accelerated rate, Western academics, writers, and artists have labored at some length to keep themselves separated from the notion of the wild natural. This is especially articulated through their work. The use of the word "natural," itself, sets up an abstraction, and our efforts reflect almost no spiritual or other meaningful connection. By learning to listen unafraid and unthreatened to wildness and the incredible beauty it represents, we may yet be able to mitigate this deafness to our lovely world.
Natural orchestrations, the sounds of our unaltered temperate, tropical, arctic, desert and marine habitats, are becoming exceedingly rare and difficult to find. The keys to our musical past and the origins of complex interspecies connection may be better understood from the acoustic output of these wonderful places, as the late Angus Wilson once demonstrated in a remote part of the Oregon wilderness. We are beginning to learn that the isolated voice of a song bird cannot give us very much useful information. It is the acoustical fabric into which that song is woven that offers up an elixir of formidable intelligence that enlightens us about ourselves, our past, and the very creatures we have longed to know so well.
[1] "Abolish the Recent," Natural History, May 1991, pages 16-21.
Bernie Krause has been recording wildlife and natural sounds since 1968, and has produced or collaborated on over fifty albums. He is President and Director of Wild Sanctuary, which specializes in terrestrial and marine bio-acoustic recording and analysis, museum exhibit sound sculpture design and the creation of music and effects for electronic media. (Find them on the World Wide Web at http://www.wildsanctuary.com.) He recently published a book and CD describing his life in the field, Notes from the Wild (Ellipsis Arts, 1996). An earlier version of this article appeared as "Bioacoustics, Habitat Ambiance in Ecological Balance," Whole Earth Review, #57, Winter, 1987.
©1998 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1998
Volume 8, Number 2
Art and Ecology