“Nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else.”
Bernie Krause has recorded over 3,500 hours of pristine environmental audio — soundscapes from nature. The most recent NY Times Magazine lets us in on some of his fascinating findings:
- Although two separate places can have similar ecosystems and other spatial ingredients, each place on earth has its own sonic fingerprint, so to speak.
- Every living organism also has its own unique acoustic signature.
- More animals being crowded into fewer natural spaces means there’s a squeeze on the sonic spectrum. Adapt — find a way to be heard — or die.
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.”
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