Going Wild with Bernie Krause

Feb 21, 2007 2:54 PM, By Gino Robair

           

In October, 2002, I visited the noted composer and bioacoustician Bernie Krause in his personal studio, located in the Northern California wine country. The visit was part of my research for an article on field recording, called "Going Wild". Krause had just published his marvelous introduction to field recording, Wild Soundscapes (Wilderness Press, 2002), and I wanted to gather some background material about his work, as well as dig deeper into his recording and editing techniques. However, only a fraction of the interview was used in the feature. Because he offered so many interesting insights into the world of bioacoustics and phonography, I've decided to post our interview in its entirety.

Why did you begin recording natural sounds?
There are several reasons why I got into this. One is because I found that the natural soundscapes, particularly in North America, were disappearing very quickly. Fully 30 percent of my library from 30 years of work comes from extinct habitats. Habitats we can't record anymore, because there's no natural sound.

Another, more important reason is because listening to natural soundscapes, through this kind of kid-simple gear, has taught me how to listen. When you listen through headphones and a microphone, the first thing that you notice is how much noise there is in our environment, and how much it proliferates everything we want to hear. And the second thing is that it teaches you how far you have to go to actually get into a place where you can hear natural sound.

The third thing is that, when you listen to natural sound, it changes everything about how you perceive the world, in the sense that it changes your time frame about things: you don't get information in quick cuts. You get information over an extended period of time, because the expression of sound takes a very long time to establish. Often, bird calls are 45 seconds or longer. A theme from a humpback whale may take you 20 minutes to half an hour to get. So you have to sit there and listen to it and abide in silence, while that occurrence is happening. Because the other thing is to shut the hell up. That's what you have to learn to do.

And so it teaches you a different way of experiencing the world. Not from the visual perspective, because a visual perspective gives us very little information. We think it gives us a lot, but it doesn't. It gives us only the trunk of the elephant. Even the expressions that we use are visual. One of the reasons that it helps us learn to listen is because microphones don't discriminate like our brains do.

Those are the reasons why I record: it teaches me critically how to listen, and it gives me a chance to live a certain way, in a different kind of time frame.

Are there any well established collections of nature recordings?
The Cornell one is probably the largest library of natural sound. But they've primarily focused on individual creatures. And to me, that's a kind of 19th-century approach to science: Abstracting things from a context, where the context is able to inform people a lot more about why these creatures vocalize, how they vocalize, and how they learn to vocalize in the first place.

What happens is that we tend to deconstruct the natural world around us by taking portions out of context. For example, taking a robin or sparrow out of context. It's like taking apart a Beethoven symphony and just examining the strings lines or the horn line. And you listen to it and you say "Well, that's really nice," but it doesn't do much to tell you what the whole piece is about. And that's what we do.

You seem to be the person that came up with the term biophony. Are you the first to have begun recording in that way? So if I went to the Cornell collection, they wouldn't have a lot of recordings of biophonies?
They have more biophony recordings than ever, because of the work we were involved in. We started in the 1960s with this stuff.

Actually, it all came about because, when Paul Beaver and I got together to do our first record for Warner Bros., In A Wild Sanctuary, the mandate was to go out and try to find a way to connect the sounds of the natural world to a synthesizer and to do an album on the subject of ecology. And I'd never been outside before.

It all came about at a very propitious time because Nagra had just come out with their new stereo portable recorder. And that allowed us to go out into the field and record in ways that we couldn't have done before. Also, new mic technology had come out at that point to allow us to record in the field without a lot of humidity and wind problems, although the mics were very sensitive. At least we could go out there now and record, with a wonderful dynamic range.

So there was an explosion of technology that occurred in the late '60s that allowed us to do this kind of work. And little by little, we put together pieces of that puzzle to do it better and better.

How did you decide where to go first, or what to record first in the wild?
That had more to do with the limits of my imagination and knowledge of recording in the field than anything. To me, the wilds were Muir Woods or the San Francisco Zoo. As long as there was some separation between me and a creature, that was deemed pretty safe.

I recorded at Ocean Beach, because I could probably get some of what I called "sea gulls." There is no such thing as a "sea gull," but there I was recording "sea gulls." I didn't know much about it and was terrified.

As I explained earlier, I wasn't raised around animals and never spent very much time outside: I was a city boy. If there wasn't a window between me and the world outside, I didn't feel particularly safe. And I think most people feel that way.

So, In A Wild Sanctuary did several things for us. One, it introduced us to technology that was portable and we found we could carry our recorders around with us rather than just have them in the studio. And that got me outside. From there on, it just exploded for me. I was hooked: I wanted to learn more about what I was doing, and I ranged further and further away from cities.

And now I'm to the point where I live here surrounded by 10 acres. We've been here 10 years and I don't think I've been to the city a half dozen times. I have no interest in it anymore.

In Wild Soundscapes, you talk about how quiet it was here after 9/11.
We're directly under the descent route to San Francisco International Airport for planes that come in from Europe and the north (such as Seattle, Portland, and Boise). They fly over at 15,000 feet and make a lot of noise.

Then there are the tourist flights. On any given weekend, and often during week days, there are light planes flying up and down the valley. You can't record for a minute or more without a plane flying by. It's very quiet today because of the weather, but after 9/11, there wasn't a thing in the sky. Not even a helicopter.

We would sit outside and be amazed in September about how much wonderful sound there was that wasn't masked or obliterated by all this mechanical, human noise around us.

I followed your book's examples about listening through mics to the environment where I live, and I was shocked at how noisy it really is, even late at night.
What's fascinating about what you're saying about there being so much noise and we're completely unaware of it — we shut most of it out — is that people like me are afraid of technology, so they won't use it, particularly when it comes to recorders. They have no problem using a video camera or still camera, or any of the new digital cameras or anything like that. But put an audio recorder in their hand and somehow they're stymied, because we're a visual culture. They have an affinity to anything visual, really quickly. But put a recorder in their hand, which is just as simple, and they block: they cannot figure out how to push the Record and Play button at the same time to record.

But when they have been out and done exactly what you did, their lives have changed. It profoundly affects them because it gives them something to think about that they haven't thought about before.

One of the things that I do with kids in schools is to give them an assignment to go out and record a robin. Okay, simple: everybody knows what a robin is. And they have to record it in their own backyard. I tell them they can get a little lavalier microphone from Radio Shack for $14. They can put all the equipment together for under $50 — really inexpensive. And then just go out and work as a team, and share it among five or six people. Go out and record a robin.

And sure enough they hear the robin chirping and they record it, and they bring the tape back to me and they say "yeah well, there's a robin in there, but there's also a bus, and a helicopter, and an airplane. There are people talking, and I hear a television, and a radio, and a booming car; and 808's going by." I said, "I want a robin. That's what I want to hear. Now go and record a robin for me." And it changes their mind. "There's too much noise. I can't get the robin." Well maybe you have to go someplace else to get the robin. Maybe you have to go to the park, or to the woods.

When I started in 1968, it used to take me 14 or 15 hours of recording to get an hour of usable material. Now it takes me a year to get that same amount of material.

When you get back to the studio, do you use the takes that don't have man-made noise, then crossfade that into another section that doesn't have man-made noise? You would have to match the time of the day and the biophony.
Sure, and I have to record over a period of many days.

Is that where the art form comes in? In matching those scenes?
Yes, and it has to be seamless. The problem is that there are recordists out there that claim they're purists. My answer to them is that, of course, if you choose a microphone system, you've done some editing. If you choose a recorder, you've done some editing. And the time of day, location, where you point your mics — all editing.

Then you've only got 74 minutes on a CD. Which 74 are you going to choose? So these guys and gals have done all the editing. Where's the pure?