Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine had a great profile on Bernie Krause, whose work with ecological soundscapes is truly remarkable. Bernie goes out into the wilderness and records the entire soundscape, mapping it onto a kind of musical score. In particular, he’s been working for nearly forty years to
…record the earth’s rapidly disappearing “biophony” — a term he coined to describe that portion of the soundscape contributed by nonhuman creatures. Biophony, Krause has theorized, is unique to each place; nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else. This idea has led him toward a controversial way of thinking that would broaden the scope of today’s evolutionary biology. Many animals, he argues, have evolved to squeeze their vocalizations into available niches of the soundscape in order to be heard by others of their kind. Evolution isn’t just about the competition for space or food but also for bandwidth. If a species cannot find a sonic niche of its own, it will not survive.
I first met Bernie at Foo Camp a few years back (one of the many serendipitous introductions that Foo makes possible), and reconnected with him recently because of some cool work he’s been doing in mapping soundscapes onto Google Earth. (I’m hoping that Google helps him expand on this idea! Imagine being able to zoom in to a spot on earth and not just see the map detail, but also hear typical sounds. This is as true of human city soundscapes as natural ones!) We’re going to have him show some of his work at Where 2.0 in May.
His work really is important, and not just cool–he’s finding that animal ecologies are actively harmed by noise as well as other human intrusions:
One of his Aha! moments occurred in Venezuela, where Krause was recording warblers. “The birds would fly through grids of sounds until they found a place where their voices wouldn’t be masked,” he says. Krause noticed that birds who settled in compromised habitats — logged-over second-growth forests, for instance — encountered unexpected vocal competitors from other species and found their mating songs masked. Warblers that failed to find unoccupied bandwidth failed to breed, Krause observed, eventually convincing him of the validity of his niche hypothesis, the contention that animals evolve to fill vocal niches to best be heard by potential mates.
What’s more, those natural sound ecologies are rapidly disappearing. There are fewer and fewer places on earth where man-made sounds do not intrude.
E.O. Wilson commented in email to Bernie (also quoted in the article), “I assumed it was all a New Age thing, of little interest to scientists. I was wrong.”