Bernie Krause is the world's leading expert in natural sound. He has spent the last 40 years recording ecological soundscapes and has archived the sounds of over 15,000 species - half of the wild soundscapes he has on tape don't exist anymore because of human actions. Krause divides natural sound into three categories. Biophony is the sound made by animals and plants, like the shrimp that makes noises underwater equivalent to 165 decibels; geophony is natural sound, like wind, water and rain, which led different tribes to have different musical scales; and anthrophony is human-generated sound, which affects animals as it changes, for example causing disoriented whales to become beached. In The Great Animal Orchestra he invites us to listen through his ears to all three as he showcases singing trees, contrasting coasts, and the roar of the modern world.Just as streetlights engulf the stars, Krause argues that human noise is drowning out the sounds of nature, but that our focus on the visual today is blinding us to this. The Great Animal Orchestra shows why it is critical to preserve what remaining soundscapes we have, and will make you hear the world entirely differently.
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Review
'A fascinating book of natural history, worthy to be read in the silence your own library' --David Bellamy
'He takes us close to the roots of the music and reminds us to stop and listen. Remarkable' --Norman Lebrecht
'This expansive tale of living amidst wild and beautiful sounds has been well worth waiting for' --David Rothenberg, ECM recording artist, and author of 'Thousand Mile Song' and 'Survival of the Beautiful'
'Truly absorbing account ... This book should and will be an inspiration to us all. I loved it.' --Terry Nutkins
'Beautifully written and intriguing ... the symphony of the world moves from background to centre stage' --David Eagleman, author of Sum and Incognito
'What we really want is something worth listening to. Nobody knows how to find it better than Bernie Krause'
A wonderful advertisement for the effects of natural sound ... Krause writes like the field naturalist he is, attentively and with a light tread ... the optimism of his spirit is infectious: this is one of those books you are grateful to have read -- Marek Kohn Independent
'Alluring ... a fun and informative read that is likely to change the way that any reader listens to soundscapes, both urban and rural'-- Sunday Times
'Weird and wonderful ... This is an extraordinary and important book. I challenge anyone to read it and not hear for themselves sounds they have never heard or rather never noticed before. I walk out now onto a refreshed, renewed moor: I accept sadly that it does not have the depth and complexity that it had even half a century ago, but I can hear it better and walk more softly myself after reading The Great Animal Orchestra'-- Sara Maitland, Spectator'A passionate advocate ... Krause writes with a rush of enthusiasm for the subject'-- BBC Wildlife
'A fascinating plea for humanity to turn the volume down and just listen' Herald
'In his fascinating book, Krause urges us to open our ears ... his tone is full of wonder' Daily Mail
'At the heart of this idiosyncratic volume is Krause s niche hypothesis ... Krause comes across as a likelable oddball, extolling the virtues of homemade clip-on cats ears and the authentic kind of ant music ... the book s coda is a passionate plea to halt human noise pollution' Sunday Telegraph
'All this magnificent, if arcane, knowledge has now been brought together by Krause in a masterly tour of the soundscape. Entitled The Great Animal Orchestra, it makes a convincing case for the soundscape's overlooked value, partly for itself, and partly as an indication of the health of the natural world, and for one overwhelming reason for us as humans: in nature's collective voice, he says, can be located the origins of human music, and perhaps even human language' --Michael McCarthy, Independent
'The way Krause describes what he hears will make you want to put on a pair of headphones and sit in the forest for a day' Conservation Magazine
'This is far more than a book of charming factoids ... it s a profound meditation on why the earth makes its sounds and how everything birdsong, waves hitting beaches, the grunts of animals, the patter of rainfall in a tropical forest is part of a constantly evolving and interconnected process ... Krause combines learned theorising with tales of his own adventures and the result is a spirited and constantly surprising book' Geographical Magazine
'A beautifully written and surprising book, packed with colourful stories' --Guardian
'He takes us close to the roots of the music and reminds us to stop and listen. Remarkable' --Norman Lebrecht
'This expansive tale of living amidst wild and beautiful sounds has been well worth waiting for' --David Rothenberg, ECM recording artist, and author of 'Thousand Mile Song' and 'Survival of the Beautiful'
'Truly absorbing account ... This book should and will be an inspiration to us all. I loved it.' --Terry Nutkins
'Beautifully written and intriguing ... the symphony of the world moves from background to centre stage' --David Eagleman, author of Sum and Incognito
'What we really want is something worth listening to. Nobody knows how to find it better than Bernie Krause'
A wonderful advertisement for the effects of natural sound ... Krause writes like the field naturalist he is, attentively and with a light tread ... the optimism of his spirit is infectious: this is one of those books you are grateful to have read -- Marek Kohn Independent
'Alluring ... a fun and informative read that is likely to change the way that any reader listens to soundscapes, both urban and rural'-- Sunday Times
'Weird and wonderful ... This is an extraordinary and important book. I challenge anyone to read it and not hear for themselves sounds they have never heard or rather never noticed before. I walk out now onto a refreshed, renewed moor: I accept sadly that it does not have the depth and complexity that it had even half a century ago, but I can hear it better and walk more softly myself after reading The Great Animal Orchestra'-- Sara Maitland, Spectator'A passionate advocate ... Krause writes with a rush of enthusiasm for the subject'-- BBC Wildlife
'A fascinating plea for humanity to turn the volume down and just listen' Herald
'In his fascinating book, Krause urges us to open our ears ... his tone is full of wonder' Daily Mail
'At the heart of this idiosyncratic volume is Krause s niche hypothesis ... Krause comes across as a likelable oddball, extolling the virtues of homemade clip-on cats ears and the authentic kind of ant music ... the book s coda is a passionate plea to halt human noise pollution' Sunday Telegraph
'All this magnificent, if arcane, knowledge has now been brought together by Krause in a masterly tour of the soundscape. Entitled The Great Animal Orchestra, it makes a convincing case for the soundscape's overlooked value, partly for itself, and partly as an indication of the health of the natural world, and for one overwhelming reason for us as humans: in nature's collective voice, he says, can be located the origins of human music, and perhaps even human language' --Michael McCarthy, Independent
'The way Krause describes what he hears will make you want to put on a pair of headphones and sit in the forest for a day' Conservation Magazine
'This is far more than a book of charming factoids ... it s a profound meditation on why the earth makes its sounds and how everything birdsong, waves hitting beaches, the grunts of animals, the patter of rainfall in a tropical forest is part of a constantly evolving and interconnected process ... Krause combines learned theorising with tales of his own adventures and the result is a spirited and constantly surprising book' Geographical Magazine
'A beautifully written and surprising book, packed with colourful stories' --Guardian
Book Description
A fascinating and unique exploration of nature's music, from plants and animals to wind and rain, Now a Radio 4 Book of the Week, starting on 2 April 2012.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Fascinating book on the aural soundscape that we have all around us, and are sadly now loosing. Krause has recored 15,000 hours of natural sounds in his time, and has cherry picked the best of them. He uses his data to show that even selective logging in a forest can have massive devastation of the wildlife, and just how much difference noise pollution can make
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By Astolpho
Format:Paperback
This is a book with one big virtue but a lot of faults.
The virtue is the central idea. The natural world consists not just of landscapes but of soundscapes, made up both with the sounds of the land and of the animals that inhabit it. These soundscapes are complex, because animals react to each other. They choose different parts of the aural spectrum for instance so that they don't clash, and they fall silent when something loud, often but not always man-made, intrudes. Experts have ignored this complexity, preferring to concentrate on the sound of a particular bird, for instance, and ignoring the context. Human beings are too numerous, too noisy and too insensitive and are systematically destroying these soundscapes.
This is a new and important idea powerfully presented. That in practice there is not a lot that can be done about it does not detract from that fact.
These are the faults.
Bernie Krause has an ear for the natural world but not for language. The writing is cloth-eared. Some of it is incomprehensible and much of it sentimental.
Krause knows a lot about sound, having spent a lifetime recording it. There are other things he doesn't know about but that doesn't stop him holding forth about them. Here are two examples.
He disses the composer Olivier Messaien, who devoted a lifetime to realising birdsong in musical form, because he dealt with birds a species at a time and ignored the aural context. This is ungracious. I dare say that Messaien has attuned more people to the sound of the natural world than has Krause, and he has done so more elegantly and more coherently.
Krause's account of the attitude of the Christian churches to music would have benefited from half an hour with Wikipedia. He would have learnt things different from what he expected and wanted to believe and it might have modified somewhat his smugness -
Which is fault three.
Finally, and most seriously, he starts out with the idea that the natural soundscapes are in some way crucial to human music. He mentions Steven Mithen's fascinating work The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, but he doesn't take Mithen's ideas any further. He has to confront the fact that music is sound that is organised in an entirely different way and for entirely different reasons from the sound of the natural world, and he never starts to do so. Instead, he retreats and devotes the final third of the book to a peevish attack on the human race. This was no doubt much easier and more amusing to write. Unfortunately journalists can do it with their brains disengaged; there are examples in the Guardian most days.
In short, there is a most important book to be written here. It's a pity that Krause gave up on it.
The virtue is the central idea. The natural world consists not just of landscapes but of soundscapes, made up both with the sounds of the land and of the animals that inhabit it. These soundscapes are complex, because animals react to each other. They choose different parts of the aural spectrum for instance so that they don't clash, and they fall silent when something loud, often but not always man-made, intrudes. Experts have ignored this complexity, preferring to concentrate on the sound of a particular bird, for instance, and ignoring the context. Human beings are too numerous, too noisy and too insensitive and are systematically destroying these soundscapes.
This is a new and important idea powerfully presented. That in practice there is not a lot that can be done about it does not detract from that fact.
These are the faults.
Bernie Krause has an ear for the natural world but not for language. The writing is cloth-eared. Some of it is incomprehensible and much of it sentimental.
Krause knows a lot about sound, having spent a lifetime recording it. There are other things he doesn't know about but that doesn't stop him holding forth about them. Here are two examples.
He disses the composer Olivier Messaien, who devoted a lifetime to realising birdsong in musical form, because he dealt with birds a species at a time and ignored the aural context. This is ungracious. I dare say that Messaien has attuned more people to the sound of the natural world than has Krause, and he has done so more elegantly and more coherently.
Krause's account of the attitude of the Christian churches to music would have benefited from half an hour with Wikipedia. He would have learnt things different from what he expected and wanted to believe and it might have modified somewhat his smugness -
Which is fault three.
Finally, and most seriously, he starts out with the idea that the natural soundscapes are in some way crucial to human music. He mentions Steven Mithen's fascinating work The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, but he doesn't take Mithen's ideas any further. He has to confront the fact that music is sound that is organised in an entirely different way and for entirely different reasons from the sound of the natural world, and he never starts to do so. Instead, he retreats and devotes the final third of the book to a peevish attack on the human race. This was no doubt much easier and more amusing to write. Unfortunately journalists can do it with their brains disengaged; there are examples in the Guardian most days.
In short, there is a most important book to be written here. It's a pity that Krause gave up on it.
By snowflake
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
A lovely, inspiring book about how music started with inaminate sounds to influence the noises and music that animals and humans make. And of course about how our industrial din destroys natural soundscapes, and how music is losing contact with its roots!
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