An Interview with Bernie Krause

The following conversation between Bernie Krause and Casey Walker took place on June 24, 1997 with the production assistance of KVMR (89.5 FM Nevada City/ 99.3 FM Sacramento) a community-supported radio station.

Casey Walker: In The Others: How Animals Make Us Human, Paul Shepard writes: "How strangely distant are the animal sounds from the modern symphony hall and the drawing room, the choral recital, and whole gestalt of 'classical' music. Formal composition and performance, allied to mathematical, architectural, and astronomical monumentality, is, like the formal gardens of the seventeenth century, a microcosm of an utterly detached observer in a rational universe." Will you speak along these lines to your own observations, why it is significant for us to draw distinctions between western music and the music of nature?
Bernie Krause: Basically, I'm a musician trained under Western canons of expectation. Much later in my life, when I began to look at our musical roots I found absolutely nothing that even suggested anything symbiotic with or connected to actual sound textures found in the natural environment. We're simply ignorant about our roots. To make a paradigm shift of the sort Paul Shepard, Jack Turner, and others suggest, requires a type of modesty and intellectual honesty unusual in academic circles.
This is not to say that there are those among us, myself included, who have not from time to time composed music and even created sound sculptures for public spaces and CDs, all the while defending the work as being linked with nature. But, we've been blowing well-rationalized smoke about this issue for years. For instance, Messiaen's Chronochromie, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Respighi's Fountains of Rome, George Crumb's Vox Ballena, Paul Winter's wolf music, and my own stuff really have nothing to do with the natural world. This unbelievably boring dialogue continues to rage among some sound designers—perhaps because we can't find more important things to discuss.
The difference is that our musical roots are western and the organization of our work is, as Shepard suggests, rational and mathematical in ways that the natural environment is not, or at least in ways measurable by our tools or criteria of observation. The other reasons are also very simple: we haven't been taught to be present within and sense natural environments without an eye (or ear) to altering what we experience. Some of my colleagues actually believe they can abstract something like the real-time recording of an environment and put it on a CD without having changed it. They label this "authentic."
Instead, the natural environment is full of wonderful and unexpected permutations caused by sheer natural diversity and the intricately, finely-tuned relationships extant in any place. The unpredictability of ways in which sounds, in particular, become articulated in a natural environment is expressly part of the magic I experience—even when there also remains in each biome a strong sense of continuity. The complex mix of unpredictability with predictability is what is authentic, and, fortunately for the natural world, is exactly what we can't begin to capture on audio tape or film no matter how hard we try. It requires our presence on the spot. It requires maximum operation of every sense we can muster. Natural sound patterns are highly musical but require a sensitivity to the aural world on the listener's part which I believe we no longer possess in Western culture, even though it may have been active at some point in our species development and still remains so in some remote forest-dwelling groups or as a distant hidden mark somewhere in our chromosome material.
Through various Western art forms—literature, cinematography, sound, and graphics—we have convinced ourselves that these recent expressions of Nature tie us more closely to the wild natural. I feel that, in general, our efforts have only served to define the incredible distance that has come between us and it. That's not bad because it is one of the necessary first steps we must take in order to find a more balanced route. The music and art of the Bayaka, the Pitjantjara, or the Kaluli, however, doesn't just define their connection, it is their link, both sacred and secular. That is the important distinction for us to begin to consider.

Much of Shepard's work suggests that humans organize themselves far more alertly, more vitally within the natural world as hunter/gatherers than humans do in cultures of agriculture, industry, and technology. Will you speculate, from your point of view, on our loss of attunement to sound patterns in nature and what that loss means?
First, our experience of the wild natural has been completely obliterated by our western attention to the visual. We actively get most of our information from seeing the world. It's inherent in our language. How many time have you heard the expression, "I see what you're saying"? Isn't it strange that most of us sighted folks have to see something in order to really hear it? A good example would be to stand by a stream and look at the white water flowing quickly over the rocks in the distance. You'll hear exactly what you're looking at even though you're actually standing by a gentle rivulet gurgling at your feet. Change your point of view to the events displayed at your feet, however, and what you'll hear will be the gurgle, not the background white noise of the more distant rushing water.
We began to lose our hearing about 30,000 years ago when the first drawings appeared on the cave walls at Lascaux. While our graphic iterations of the natural world have improved greatly, the abilities to hear it have disappeared into distorted abstraction. Very recently, however, about thirty years ago, when recording technologies allowed us to go into the field and begin to "listen" qualitatively again, our ancient compulsion to put our ear to the earth, perhaps for one last concert, materialized in ways we could have not imagined.
My guess is that the proclivity to separate out our experiences into component parts developed very long ago in western culture. Language was part of it. So were various aspects of culture and philosophy. Plato's belief in the realm of the ideal was a truth the institutional western mind bought into immediately. Socrates' constant dialogue with the world was atomized as a result.
The wonder for me working in wild environments is that all my senses come to play. I was intrigued by a comment Jack Turner made about his uncle, the marine who helped raise him, in the introduction of his book The Abstract Wild. He quotes him as saying : "Anyone who sees both sides of an issue doesn't see one damn thing." I couldn't agree more. But, although I know he was speaking of right and wrong, and Turner of concepts unknown and unarticulated in the truly wild, I agree for different reasons. There are so many wondrous sides to the issue of experiencing the natural world that I can't wait to begin to take them all in.
"What is essential, is invisible to the eye." St. Exupery's aphorism expresses most everything I feel and have come to know. Luckily, my eyesight just isn't that good. It has been my experience that the truths imposed are not always the truths revealed.
So, we've muddled along trying to fit our new very arrogant paradigms into much more complex natural realities. The more we've failed, the more we've defended our intellectual turf. Such is our hubris. Science is still caught in its own "study-the-single-creature" trap. As I wrote in a recent article (the unedited version), "What Does Music of the West Have to do With Nature?", Rousseau painted lovely pictures of animals living in a kind of symbiotic, perfect harmony. In a similar manner, I find it very difficult to hear the so-called music-inspired-by-nature oeuvre without tying it to the fanciful model of what the artists thinks Nature ought to be or sound like.
Marcel Proust understood the problem when he said, "Possibly the immobility of things around us has merely been imposed on them by our certainty that they are what they are and nothing else, by the immobility of our thinking about them." Mostly, my own work and that of others only evokes a continued longing for the real thing. Part of the problem is that, all too often, these expressions eliminate humans altogether as an essential component of the equation.
In the late 1980s I did some work for The Nature Company. At first, it was a glorious experience because the president knew something about both art and nature. But he died of cancer and it was taken over by a corporate entity and populated with types who knew absolutely nothing about either music as an art, natural sound as a subject, or sound production. The last album I did for them, Meridian, had as its theme following spring as it moved north 16 miles a day along the 111 meridian (the vision quest route of many Native American tribes often called "The Good Red Road") from Nogales to the Canadian border just north of Chester, Montana. When Phil Aaberg, my colleague from Montana who wrote the music score, brought one of the folks on the judgment committee into the studio to play the album, she ordered us to take out the human footsteps. "No humans in nature, please!" she decreed imperiously. "Our customers won't like it." Now, the separation had a corporate stamp of approval.
There is light, however. When you begin to experience groups like Steven Feld's Kaluli forest dwellers in New Guinea or with Louis Sarno's group, the Babenzele (Bayaka) Pygmies, in the rainforests of the Central African Republic, you quickly find that the daily lives of these people reflects a direct affinity to the biophonies (biophony is the total and combined aural output that whole groups of living organisms produce in a specific biome at a given moment) of their environment and just about everything they do. You see, sound plays a major role.
Sarno says one of the most robust links is an association to the forest and its creature voices that is strongly spiritual and social. In the case of the Bayaka, and with the Jivaro I've worked with in the Amazon basin, it is as if their lives cannot go on without being able to hear and make the vast number of distinctions we have long forgotten. The intricate fabric of their lives is guided by the sounds of surrounding forests. The music is a result of interacting with forest biophony as a virtual karaoke orchestra to which they create their intricate harmonies, rhythms, melodies and sonic textures. Likewise and obviously, so too their hunts, dances and sacred ceremonies—those not corrupted by contact with the missionaries. These folks have not lost their wildness and I believe the forest sounds are the glue that holds it together. According to Sarno, when the Bayaka are deep in the forest they do not get sick; physically or mentally. They only begin to suffer badly when they come in close proximity to "civilization."

Along these lines, Paul Shepard notes in "The Gift of Music" that we've lost touch with sound as "ambient" and sound as "sign," and instead listen to music as psychologically regressed beings—as "noise" which is tactile and therapeutic.
Exactly. We don't hear anymore. Noam Chomsky makes the case several others have made that we are victims and participants of a "manufactured consent" that is absolutely insidious. It is so bad that we have also lost the ability to discern the difference between what is so bloody harmful to us and what is healthy. I almost never watch TV. It hurts my ears and assaults my senses in ways that enrage me. That goes even for nature shows. Partly it's because we're not attuned to the options and partly because, in our haste to acquire things, we've obliterated most of what's spiritually and ethically valuable and healing.
My saddest realization is that as a culture we have lost the texture of natural sound. This was a major reference for our ancestors and a precious one it was. The most important part of sound in music is the texture, the warp and woof of the stuff of sound. It's all the feel of music—the way it arrives. It's the aural equivalent of feeling a piece of cashmere wool or a shoe-full of rocks. When some people hear ambient sound like the kinds I produce in my recordings, it sounds cacophonous, noisy. They feel the need to have it lubricated with music or something else familiar and reassuring. Others get very upset when they go into a forest and hear it for real. They wish the level could be turned down. To me, it's gorgeous. It's lyrical. It has such richness to it that mends and nourishes the soul. As the textures change over time and the night progresses, the temperature, humidity, and wind alter the moods constantly. It's as dramatic as a Tony Award-winning New York play, but we don't pay any attention to these things. At night in Africa one of the things you notice most is that when night falls and dew forms on the surfaces of ground, leaves and branches, the forest becomes luminous with reverberation. The concert hall has changed. All the surfaces are reflective and certain creatures wait until conditions are just right before they use it as a platform from which to project.

In "What Does Music of the West Have to do With Nature?", you wrote of the seamlessness in any given place between sound and the dappling of light, the moisture of leaves, the lay of the land and so forth. Ultimately what one hears is inseparable from the living dynamic of any given moment and can only be witnessed as a listening and engaged participant. Will you speak to the ways in which these observations concretely describe what much of our scientific approach misses?
I'm always told by my scientific friends to stop being so anecdotal. I'm delighted that the world of science hasn't touched this subject yet. What I lament in that article is what we've lost in this world through our deafness to it. Not only have we lost our ability to hear and distinguish important subtleties, but we've diminished and overwhelmed that world so it's hard to find them. In the spectrograms you can see the ways in which sound is spectacularly ordered in a natural environment. It is absolutely the first time in Western culture that I've ever seen these biophonies graphically described in this way. It was a surprise to me. When I put each habitat sound sample up on the computer to get a voice print—and I've pulled thousands from different habitats around the world—each printout as distinctive as a person's fingerprint. I've been recording the sounds of the natural world for 30 years next year and have accumulated the largest habitat sound library in private hands anywhere—about 3,500 hours and over 15,000 creatures. Over that time, I'd say 40 percent of those habitats, those unique voices, have been lost because of human greed and resultant development. However, in our music and audio production, there's scant evidence of the natural world.

When and how did you first put together the implications of what you were hearing in the field?
It happened the first time in early 1983, in Africa. I was in a tent by the river, not far from Governor's Camp, and I noticed how the hyena sounds were being carried through the forest after a rainstorm. These sounds were being articulated in a very different way from what I'd heard before. I began to listen to the forest, and it struck me at that moment that there was a relationship between all the sounds I hadn't noticed previously. While waiting for more species-specific events to occur, I began to record the ambient sound thinking that once I got home I'd examine them on my computer to see whether the patterns I thought I was hearing, existed. In the past, I'd recorded single birds and single animals in order to isolate their voices...the usual scientific techniques we are all taught. All of these studies had everything to do with capturing a particular sound with ego and skill and nothing to do with what these sounds meant as an aggregate expression. Being a natural skeptic, I always questioned the paradigm of our approach and what we were getting from it but had no reason before then to think there was anything else to observe.
When I came home and took my spectrograms to the California Academy of Sciences, the only graphics that
mattered to my colleagues were those of the single isolated creatures and not of the ambient whole. I thought to myself, why is this? There is such a strong resistance to my findings that I must be onto something. There wasn't a single person at the California Academy of Sciences that accepted ambient sound with more than a passing curiosity. However, Professor Ken Norris of UC Santa Cruz Environmental Studies Department bit like a shark at the stuff and it was with his generous encouragement that I continued. This broke the ice with several others and the battle is now on for the territory. By the way, I'm just sitting on the shore—fishing.
With so little support from the academic community at first, I went back to work on these spectrograms and found that, indeed, there were patterns and that every recording from a different place showed slightly different shapes and niches. Despite regional similarities, there are micro habitat differences as one walks through a forest space consisting sometimes of 100 square meters. Furthermore, because I was in Africa for quite a long period of time, I found that distinctive sound patterns defined every given hour of the night. It was just amazing. The same thing was true, of course, of sounds during the daytime. Additionally, I found at Governor's Camp that when one creature stopped vocalizing in the acoustical biospectrum, another creature would immediately begin to vocalize and fill that gap to keep that biophony intact.

Meaning there's an integrity to the ambient sound, the overall musical score of any given micro habitat that each creature plays into?
That would appear to be the case. It implies an evolved order of sound patterns in a given biome. These also change constantly. Every component one can think of affects the biophony and the permutations become endless. It would take lifetimes to listen to the possibilities of any given space. These, of course, include weather, seasonal issues, and time of day or night.

In your article "The Niche Hypothesis: Why Creatures Vocalize and the Relationships Between Natural Sound and Music," you write, "When we have tried to record in new stands of trees planted in the Olympic peninsula by Georgia-Pacific and other lumber companies, we have found a profound lack of biodiversity evidenced first by the obvious monoculture of corn-rowed stands of fast-growing pines and very little supporting vegetation growing on the forest floor, but more so by the overwhelming silence." Besides silence, are there other indicators in range or patterns of sound that determine the living health of a place?
Given the fact the density of sound obviously changes as one moves either north or south of the Equator, it generally holds that the complexity of the patterns will determine several things: first, a habitat's basic health; but also, the more complex the pattern, such as in Borneo where the Asian paradise flycatcher vocalizes in several niches at the same time like a large piano chord, it indicates a very long evolution. Any creature needs a long time in any habitat to establish a vocalization that fills, say, three or four niches much like a chord, and be heard. It must take millenia. A secondary growth habitat, in contrast, is quite simplistic. Depending on the age of the biome and its relative distance from the Equator, the patterns will be far less distinctive or there may be none at all that we can detect with the technologies we currently use. The page can be totally white or black because no vocal niches have been established. Some few tropical areas have a tendency to recover sometimes more quickly, but it will take them a very long time to come to a point where the habitat biota is stable again.

Will you explain the implications of our destruction of various sound niches?
In the example of migrating eastern American warblers, which learn only one song in their lives, it becomes disastrous when their destinations in Latin American are deforested and they are unable to adjust to alternative niches elsewhere. Their voices cannot be heard—even in habitats a few hundred meters distant from the original where the flora and geological references appear to be similar to their old homes nearby. This niche hypothesis advances a whole new understanding of survival and extinction for species. It also posits a whole new way of looking at habitat or territory partially based on R. Murray Schafer's early idea of soundscapes. Now it is defined in dimensions well beyond a 3-D topographical map or by headcount of species.

Will you speak to the ways in which your niche hypothesis flies in the face of our usual scientific approach to the world, the emphasis on parts rather than the whole—the proverbial missing the forest through the trees?
As a matter of fact, Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out we do miss the forest through the trees because we concentrate so hard on the minutiae, the detail, that we miss the big picture. There is so much information we need to understand. We need new language and markers to decipher what the big picture is telling us. We rarely look or listen to our surroundings as a whole. The natural world is simply too complex to reduce to a few equations for most academics. From the 19th Century through today, we've encouraged students and learners to find things we can measure so we can then forensically spend a lot of time destroying one another's data. None of this makes very much sense because we haven't got very much true information in the first place about the natural environment, and then to spend the rest of the time vilifying each other's work is one of the many types of pathology Paul Shepard was speaking about.
Rick Bass writes in Nine Mile Wolves of his relief to be able to address environmental issues as a liberated observer and not a scientist beholden to the number and proof. I, too, have dropped out of that game and now fund my own work from sound art commissions and sales of CDs. In order for a scientific hypothesis about the world to stand, it must be measurable and repeatable. What I'm doing is certainly measurable: I can take 10 second samples forever and come up with all of these wonderful patterns which demonstrate the case, but nothing I'm doing points to the full meaning. Maybe these observations of the whole points to a new method of observation. Ultimately, you have to go out there and listen to it. Wouldn't it be great to have a Department of Speculation somewhere?
When referring to wildness and the natural world, I prefer to use the word, "ecotone." It's a place in the margins Florence Krall Shepard speaks about in her book of the same name. She writes, "From my perspective, every living thing in the natural world is both separate and different while, at the same time, being absolutely dependent on all other forms of life; a composite where everything interacts and interrelates." In a footnote, she refers to Nature as meaning : ". . .the nonhuman as well as the human components of the Earth and the processes that bind organisms and nonliving environment in interrelationships." Nature and Earth are capitalized ". . .to emphasize the specificity and numinous quality of this dwelling place and of life processes."
In addition, for me, it comprises the unquantifiable, a priori experience of the natural world. I do not mean this in a romantic sense, but rather with a high level of acceptance that comes with the certainty that there are many permutations of environment we will never know. Therein lies the wonder. I find it far more interesting as I said in my article, "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."

Will you speak to the refinement of your own ear as it has become more discriminating?
I've recently learned to tune in better than ever before. Hearing sounds as I know them in the natural environment has taught me to appreciate textures—whether it's instrumental orchestral textures or so-called indigenous music—in ways I've never been able to hear them before because I immediately gravitate to the roots of what I'm hearing. In Louis Sarno's recordings of the Bayaka pygmies, I can listen to the resonance of the music and feel myself in the forest enjoying the textures arising from the creature sounds from which the music originally took root. When I hear Messiaen, I think of school, and visualize a Master's Degree in Music from the Paris Conservatory hanging on the wall in his studio.
For me, I experience the natural world as very reassuring and comforting. I feel safe within it all and hopeful. My senses are alive. While I'm not optimistic about us and what we're doing to it, I remain hopeful at the same time. It's a real conundrum. I guess that's because I'm fortunate to be blinded by the enthusiasm of the young folks I work with whenever I can. In moments of being in a richly textured environment, I have hope it will all come back regardless of us and what we do. Or, maybe people who can hear it will finally understand what it is we have been missing all along and will rally to restore some lost quality of life. That's partly the reason I produce the CDs from various places I've been. I hope someone will get their collective butts outside and listen for themselves. Yet, people have come to our house from the city and have been terrified by the silence here. They complain they can't sleep because it is too quiet!

It brings to mind, from a literary angle, our fascination with poetic rhythm and beat as an embodied language that is lyrical by nature and closer in pattern, as you suggest, to the dynamism of a world we are dissociating from while forgetting and destroying it.
The prosody and drama created by natural sound textures is pure lyricism. Poetry. There's a beauty to the structure and form that we haven't been able to experience before in our culture because there is no premium placed on the value of these things. We humans haven't been able to auralize or understand what is possible for us when we just shut up. You have to trust first that it is a germane part of our lives, and, second, that as a western human we know relatively little about the natural world. There aren't a lot of people, unfortunately, willing to admit these things to themselves.
I'm not even certain of what I am witnessing. For instance, the kind of equipment I'm measuring this stuff on, like spectrogram analyzers, was designed and created by males in the laboratory to test for male voices and do voice prints on male voices. We cannot even do an accurate voice print for female voices, which are typically about a major third higher in pitch than their male counterparts. We're that limited by our technology. It makes me wonder about the accuracy of our recordings—the patterns are unquestionable—but can you imagine what we are still missing in sound?!
I am reminded of a passage in Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, where he suggests how little we know about our animal past and our kinship to it. He speculates how necessary that kinship is to our judgment of what is "real," especially when we compare the creations of forest or desert cultures living in the ecotone to our own meager efforts. It is of no little consequence that many writers and poets are looking more deeply into these creations with an eye and an ear to fundamental discoveries about human nature. Many writers and poets are beginning to address this now. Certainly David Abram makes this point over and over in The Spell of the Sensuous, as do Paul Shepard and Loren Eisley. Even Gregory Bateson talked about the patterns that connect. Part of the problem is that these patterns lie just beyond a horizon that we can't even begin to see.
This whole discussion reminds me of a story often told by Bateson to his classes. It seems that Bertrand Russell was invited by his colleague and friend, Alfred North Whitehead, to come to Harvard to teach in 1919. The theme of Russell's first lecture was to be a simple explanation of Max Planck's Quantum Theory. It was a hot August night and the lecture hall was filled with faculty and Boston society. Russell spoke for well over an hour and, completely drenched with sweat at the conclusion, slumped exhaustedly into his seat. Whitehead walked slowly to the podium and in his high-pitched English-accented voice looking at his friend intoned, "I'd like to thank Professor Russell for his brilliant exposition; and especially for leaving unobscured, the vast darkness of the subject."

Lastly, you've suggested two words, "biophony" and "biophany." How do these words describe new ways of thinking about and listening to sounds in nature?
These words came to me the other night after reading Abram and considering his challenge to come up with new, useful language to speak of our natural environment. "Biophany" is an insight into the natural world of living organisms as we allow it to be revealed to us. It's a particular vision or appearance of biological life. "Biophony," pronounced the same way, is the combined sound that whole groups of living organisms produce in a given biome and at a given moment. "Biophony" has been used before in a remote and very arcane sense to describe certain aural medical conditions in the body (heartbeat, blood flow, breathing, peristalsis, etc.) but it has not been defined before in this manner. "Biophany" is a word I've never seen previous to this iteration. Both words, both experiences, give rise to what I care most about—trying to find ways to soothe my soul and temper my rage.
A recent biophany occurred when a colleague tried to defend wildlife by virtue of "rights." Both John Stuart Mill and John Locke had it dead wrong. There is no such thing as a right in the animal world. We opt for life and strive to continue as long as we animals can hold on to it. As both predators and prey, the world of the Others has taught me the necessity of living as a community, however. For humans, that requires unusual skills since, lacking a more natural internal guidance mechanism, we now have to find ways to superimpose moral imagination over our tendency to alter, control, and impose our will on everything we come in contact with. For me, the biophany manifests in the form of a quest seeking to link more with the former and less with the latter. I strongly suspect the answer will come partially from experiencing the ever more rare whispers emanating from what remains of the wild oceans, forests and deserts of the world. For some reason that continues to elude us; there is no issue of rights there.
There doesn't need to be.