Biophony
“ If you saw Bernie Krause, a sotto voce man with heavy, nearsighted eyes, seated amid the baffling array of high-tech sound-engineering gear in his Glen Ellen, Calif., studio, you might never guess that he was once flung down a Rwandan mountainside by a mountain gorilla. Or that he forced himself to sit coolly still in the stultifying blackness of an Amazon jungle night while a prowling jaguar mouthed a microphone he had set up only 30 feet down the trail. As Krause tells these tales of peril, his voice resonates with a certain fearlessness developed during his worldwide, nearly 40-year quest 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. ”