In the late 1960s, when musician Bernie Krause first wandered into a park to record nature sounds, he had 30-plus pounds of recording equipment and little idea of what he had come to collect. Half a century and 4,500 hours of recordings later, he has written Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes, an introduction to soundscape ecology—the field he helped pioneer.
Krause has traveled around the world recording Arctic glaciers, Rwandan mountain gorillas, Sumatran rainforest, Antarctic seals, and more. But more than half of his archive comes from locations that are now “so badly compromised by … human intervention that the habitats are either altogether silent or … can no longer be heard in their original forms.”
Susan Pagani 