This is a book about natural soundscapes and their beauty, wisdom, and importance.

Krause started out as a musician in LA, but quickly shifted over to recording natural soundscapes (jungles, seashores, tundra, etc.). This book is a summary of his life's work, and is accompanied by excerpts of some of his various recordings.

Krause was a pioneer in the field of recording natural soundscapes. Before him, there were people recording individual animals (birds, for example)—but the presence and quality of an individual animal tells you little about the state of the overall ecosystem. This is in contrast to an immersive and holistic soundscape—which may be the fastest and most comprehensive way of assessing the overall health of an ecosystem. Healthy ecosystems are saturated across the entire sonic spectrum, with each sonic niche filled by a different organism. They also are structured; for example, with some species, an alpha frog sets the tempo, and each other frog places his vocalizations in rhythm, as opposed to everyone crocking out of sync.

To record a soundscape like humans hear them is a technical challenge; the human ear, as well as our attention, works differently than a microphone. A lot of Krause's early work involved various mic placement, and syncing and integrating these tracks. It can also be challenging to find a spot away from human noise, as well as to record in a way not overly disrupted by wind.

The overarching themes of the book are reverence, for the power and significance of natural soundscapes, and grief, because half of the ecosystems that Krause recorded during his career are no longer there (due to habitat loss, extinction, etc.).

I happen to also be reading the work of Iain McGilchrist at the moment, who is focused on the different paradigms associated with each brain hemisphere. I can't help but notice than soundscapes, potentially more than just about any other facet of an ecosystem, must be heavily engaged via the right brain. The right brain engages depth (the left brain is unable to do so, rather seeing the world as a series of flat snapshots). What is a soundscape, if not deep, both temporally and tonally? The right brain also perceives the whole of something (in an instant), where as the left brain picks through the pieces.

The latter part of the book is focused on the human and ecological impacts of noise pollution. Did you know that the Environmental Protection Agency, starting in 1972, housed the Office of Noise Abatement and Control? Did you know that this government body was dissolved a decade later, and the legislation mandating these protections remains in force today, but has been unfunded for the past four decades? I've always been very sensitive to what many would call "background noise." Krause cites data showing that everyone is; many people just aren't conscious of the ways that it is raising their anxiety levels and decreasing their concentration. Unfortunately, it is an even larger issue for animals. I've been out on a few vision fasts in remote areas. Despite the fact that I might be a five-hour drive from the nearest city, I can still hear the sound of airplanes flying overhead a few times an hour (for maybe five minutes each time). It is chilling how difficult it is to get away from human-produced sound. I'm not a sea creature, but the situation is even worse there, as water conducts sound even better than air.

As the title implies, this book looks at the sounds of animals. I would be interested to learn more about the way in which other kingdoms of life engage with and are affected by soundscapes.

Overall, this book is an inspiring and humbling window into the world of natural soundscapes. ( )

Interesting ( )

Fascinating book on the aural soundscape that we have all around us, and are sadly now loosing.

Krause has recored 15,000 hours of natural sounds in his time, and has cherry picked the best of them.

He uses his data to show that even selective logging in a forest can have massive devastation of the wildlife, and just how much difference noise pollution can make ( )

Quite interesting, although a bit repetitious, when discussing soundscapes (geophony, biophony, anthrophony) & the bioacoustic recordings & logs that the author has made over the past 40 years. This is Krause's area of expertise & he elucidates it well. The book is less compelling when the author extrapolates from his experience & data to make assessments and broad judgements about wildness & nature in relation to homo sapiens. For example, he talks about a wild pre-modern Amazon rainforest without acknowledging recent scholarship regarding the probable human role in creating & nurturing those forests' unparallelled abundance & diversity. Throughout, he vacillates between placing humans in opposition to and including them within Nature. He doesn't make enough of a distinction between the anthrophony produced by the human voice & other physiological interactions with the environment & that produced by human-made machinery, electronics, etc. Again, we are part of & other than at the same time. He also doesn't mention global overpopulation as a contributing factor in the disproportionate impact of human activity on other species. Instead he focuses solely on the activities themselves. It is at least possible that, even if every existing human being were to return to a more "natural" way of living in harmony with his or her surroundings, human beings' sheer force of numbers would still adversely affect other species. ( )

Interesting book on how music exists in the natural world. It jumps around a bit and could have some better organizational structure, but the writing is well-done and the concept is interesting and one I hadn't heard before: by tracking the animal sounds various biomes produce, over time you can determine how well the area is doing. The author did some sound recordings of a forest before and after it was selectively logged. While it looked the same after, the recordings showed a drastic drop in number and species of animals. This will get you thinking about how essential sound is to wildlife and their environments and how it hopefully provides another tool to use in fighting for the natural spaces. ( )