The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

Bernie Krause is one of the world's experts in natural sound, and here we listen through Krause's ears as he collects the sounds of purring jaguars, snapping shrimp, cracking glaciers--and the roar of the wild. It is an intensely personal narrative of life as it hits the ears, and of the planet's deeply connected natural sounds and music.

Krause also shows that just as streetlights drown out the stars, human noise is vanishing the sounds of nature--and the very soundscapes that help us understand how wild sound and music connect.

A travelogue of sound based on a lifetime of study, this account will leave you hearing--and seeing--nature as never before.

"This memoir of sonic investigation highlights the lessons learned from 40 years of listening to the world's biophonies — the sounds of living organisms. Musician and naturalist Krause (Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World) uses the language of music to understand everything from birdsong, to ocean waves, to decimated habitats, relying perhaps too heavily on the experiences of Native peoples to answer his questions about the origins of music, especially how the sonic structure inherent in biophany impacted human expression to take the form of music. While Krause notes competing theories on music's evolution and makes a clear case for nature's ongoing influence on contemporary composition, the origins of music are never found. Instead, Krause's musical expertise allows him to hear the orchestral layering of different species in each biophony, an insight that explains group vocalization as an evolutionary survival mechanism rather than a purposeful chorus of noise. As Krause discovered early in his career, his body of work unintentionally revealed 'the state of biomes that have rendered ecologically transformed through human intervention.' Photos." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.