Illustration by Katie Lukes (originally for The Chicago Reader)
Summary
The world is full of sound. With the help of Hildegard Westerkamp, Bernie Krause, and Nick Friedman, we untangle some of the amazing ways that we can learn about our planet by listening to it. Join us as we explore the nature of sound through the sounds of nature. Featuring sublime electroacoustic composition, stunning field recordings, and cutting-edge scientific research, it all begins by listening.
Show Notes
This episode features Hildegard Westerkamp, Bernie Krause, and Nicholas Friedman.
Music and soundscapes in this episode include:
Their Own Flavour by Sunfish Moon Light
Excerpts from “Directions” by Peter Huse & the World Soundscape Project’s Soundscapes of Canada
Field Recordings by Andrzej Kozlowski
Remote recordings of Yanbaru Kuina (Okinawa Rail) by The Ryukyu Soundscapes Project
Women Gathering Mushrooms recorded by Louis Sarno, courtesy of Wild Sanctuary
Future Ecologies Theme (The Free Woman) by Sunfish Moon Light
As well as audio recorded by straget, Q.K., aURE, Exomène, tim.khan, felix.blume, caquet, and juskiddink protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project.
You can study the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology online by theme or by keyword, or order it on CD.
Bernie Krause’s enormous archive of recordings (over 5000h of meticulously produced sound) is in search of permanent institutional housing. If you would like to help their cause, please reach out to info@wildsanctuary.com
This episode was produced by Mendel Skulski, Simone Miller, and Andrzej Kozlowski, with help from Adam Huggins.
Special thanks to Jenni Schine, Barry Truax, Wreford Miller, Deblekha Guin and the Access to Media Education Society, Gael McCool, David Abram, and Katie Lukes.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, and we like to cite our sources:
Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Droumeva, M., and Randolph, J. (2019) Sound, Media, Ecology. Palgrave Macmillan.
Krause, B., (2013) The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the Worlds Wild Places. Profile Books.
Peck JE. (1994) Development of hearing. Part I: Phylogeny. J Am Acad Audiol. Sep;5(5) 291-299. PMID: 7987018.
Schafer, R M. (1977) The Tuning of the World. Random House Inc.
Schafer R M. (2009) I have never seen a sound. Canadian Acoustics;37(3):32-4. Available from: https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2123
Westerkamp, H. (2007) Soundwalking. Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Ed. Angus Carlyle, Double Entendre, Paris, p. 49.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, and more. This season, Mendel guiding a tour of mushrooms and the Kingdom Fungi.
Future Ecologies is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia. This episode was also recorded on Pomo, Coast Miwok and Wappo territory (otherwise known as Sonoma, California), and on the Ryūkyū Archipelago (Okinawa Island).
Transcript
Introduction Voiceover 0:01
You are listening to Season Two of Future Ecologies.
[Growing ambient music which continues under Hildegard's remarks] – Beneath the Forest Floor by Hildegard Westerkamp
Hildegard Westerkamp 0:09
The true state of listening cannot be acquired by force. The order to listen - listen! - we all have heard and experienced it, guarantees the closing off, a turning away, a non listening, possibly even a permanent disturbance in our once open and trusting listening channels. It is perceived like any sound that annoys, disrupts, hurts, or injures. We cringe, we try to block it out, might fight it, may want to get rid of it, but we will not listen. By its very nature, listening is a continual and gentle process of opening. We usually know when we are in that place of perceptual receptivity and we know when we have lost it. Listening is never static, cannot be held on to, and in fact needs to be found again and again.
As such, it is disruptive in its nature.
Paradoxically, while a grounded and calm state of mind, a sense of safety, peace, and relaxation are essential for inspiring perceptual wakefulness and a willingness and desire to open our ears, normal routines, habits, and patterns will be disrupted and laid bare in such a process of listening,
Noises and discomforts inevitably will be noticed, and all kinds of experiences will be stirred and uncovered. Listening in fact implies a preparedness to meet the unpredictable and unplanned, to welcome the unwelcome. How do we reach such a state of listening? Why would we want to?
[music is replaced by sounds of crows, of machinery, of water]
Mendel Skulski 2:19
Sound, for those of us lucky enough to sense it, is an endless stream of information. Whether it is quiet or loud, rhythmic, piercing, or droning. Wherever there is air, there is always sound ready to be perceived. Simply put your trust in your ears and discover the ease with which you can distinguish the spaces around you. Their textures, their contents. You can even hear the difference between hot and cold water pouring into the same glass.
[sounds of hot and then cold water being poured into a glass]
Sound travels, unimpeded by twists or turns or obstacles. We can often hear things we have little hope of seeing. This is not a new discovery. It's the reason why sound is the basis for the vast majority of animal communication.
[Gentle music under Mendel's speech] – The Oldest Tree in the World by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
It's theorized that the first animals to truly hear were some of the bony fishes, at least 400 and 50 million years ago. Their swim bladders may have coincidentally granted them a new ability to sense pressure changes in the water. Over time, this organ for balance stretched, curled, and specialized, transforming into the auditory labyrinth we recognize as our inner ear. In fact, a very similar course of events may have evolved independently on as many as five separate occasions, a testament to the usefulness of sound.
[Music swells]
Hey, Mendel here. I'm giving Adam a break on this episode. But thankfully, I'm getting some help from a couple other pals. You'll be meeting them shortly. We're going to be exploring the nature of sounds through the sounds of nature, from artistic, archival, and analytical perspectives. So, stick around because we've got some real ear candy coming your way. And I know we always say this but we really mean it. Thank you for listening.
Introduction Voiceover 5:07
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Peoples, this is Future Ecologies, where your hosts Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski explore the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
[Music ends]
Mendel Skulski 5:32
We'll start this journey from where I am now, on unceded Coast Salish territories, the west coast of mainland Canada, Vancouver, British Columbia, not just because it's convenient for me personally, but because this is the birthplace of a new school of how we relate to sound and our sonic environment. Here in Vancouver, in the midst of the revolutionary 1960s and early 70s, a movement was forming in the halls of academia. A composer named R. Murray Schafer was questioning conventional assumptions about the nature of music and noise, and trying to draw attention to the persistent sonic environment. [sounds of voices begin in the background] His lectures on the newly coined "soundscape" were transformative for a generation of music students.
Hildegard Westerkamp 6:22
It just had this effect on me, it just popped whatever cork I had in my ear. That music wasn't able to, music studies were not able to bring that out of my ear. That lecture did. And I walk out of the music building and I hear everything. And it's fantastic, but it's also absolutely hard to deal with. Because then you hear all the noises, too.
Mendel Skulski 6:49
This is Hildegard Westerkamp. She was among the very first students to witness Schafer's thoughts about soundscapes, and it shaped her life's work.
Hildegard Westerkamp 6:58
For simplicity's sake I usually say that I'm a composer. If people ask more questions, then I start talking about that I almost exclusively composed with environmental sounds. I have some pieces that also include live instruments, but my main interest is in listening to the environment, exploring our sense of perception towards environment and living beings, and that figures into my composition. So when I compose with environmental sounds, the language of environmental sounds is the really important aspect of my work. So it's never an abstract piece of music. It always has a message, it always has something to say about the environment, about a place, about a situation.
Mendel Skulski 7:50
In 1973, Hildegard joined Schafer and a small cadre of others in the newly formed World Soundscape Project. At the time, so-called noise pollution was a growing topic of discussion. And its solution was simple: the world should be quiet. The aim of the World Soundscape Project was to reframe the conversation to establish that some sounds are pleasant, others are irritating. And that when taken together, they represent the unique character of a place: a soundscape. And the things within it? Sound makers.
[Sounds of wind in the background]
Hildegard Westerkamp 8:27
Anywhere where there's air, anything that moves makes sound. So the tree is a sound maker in the wind. The leaves are sound makers in the wind. All the animals are sound makers. We are sound makers. And usually sound making is a message. If the wind makes a certain kind of sound in the tree, we understand the nature of the wind, whether it's a storm, whether it's a breeze, whether it's something gentle or very forceful, powerful, et cetera, et cetera.
Mendel Skulski 9:02
And even those things that don't move play a part in our sonic environment. They reflect, absorb, or scatter the work of sound makers, adding their own flavour to our ears.
[Funky music begins] – Ear Candy by Sunfish Moon Light
Mendel Skulski 9:20
Until only very recently, all sound was ephemeral. It formed a unique relationship between sound maker and sound perceiver, one that could never be held onto or duplicated. And since two ears can never share exactly the same space, each sound will be heard differently by different listeners. Suddenly, the technology of the written word gave language a foothold in time. Words were no longer gone as soon as they were uttered, available only to those present. They could be preserved, allowing an author to speak to an indefinite audience. What's more, they could be copied and edited. In many ways, this new faculty was a decisive moment in human history. With it came undeniable powers of communication and organization. For better or for worse, it offered humanity an asylum from the relentless now, the invention of a written language decoupled the mind from its immediate environment. And perhaps it fundamentally changed the way that we situate ourselves in nature.
[Record scratch]
Mendel Skulski 10:36
Next, our capacity to record expanded from language to sounds in general, from wax cylinders to vinyl records to magnetic tape. With varying degrees of fidelity, one could capture the sounds of voices, music, or whatever the recordist turned their attention to. By the time the World Soundscape Project was formed, their ambitions were in enabled by the very latest technology: compact, portable electronic tape recorders, ready to document the sonic world and present it as avant garde radio programming on CBC Ideas.
Media Clip – CBC Ideas 11:15
For the next hour, I need your ears.
Hildegard Westerkamp 11:16
So there would be a whole show on the sound marks of Canada. There was a whole show that was called Directions, where my colleagues were asking for directions everywhere in order to get the dialects from the regions.
Media Clip - CBC 11:32
[a collection of media clips which fade in and out, overlapping one another, in various dialects ordered from Canada’s East coast to the West]
[Clip 1] So the next street, and you follow the next street right out. Can't miss it. It's right out around the point. But you follows..."
[Clip 2] Quite a ways from here. You have to go down New Ross, don't you? Just back across the beach, the roadhouse to your right... Past Halifax on the new road, isn't it?
[Clip 3] Northeast and southwest. [alarm sounds] Many's the time I seen a ship turn [sound of alarm] and headed off to sea.
[Clip 4] We're going to go down, follow-- if you want to follow us here. We're just going in here and I'll pick up my car and I'll come back out and you can follow me around and I'll show you where it is, eh?
[Clip 5] [speaking French]
[Clip 6] It's about four or five blocks... no, no.... Five blocks... Just keep going straight and you can't miss it.
[Clip 7] Khatsahlano, that's Kitsilano...Stanley Park is [speaking in Squamish]
[Clip 8] We've got a long ways to go, really. Yeah, he said an hour...
[Tape scramble]
Hildegard Westerkamp 12:43
And that was like a-- like a poetic-- a sound poem almost, an hour of that. [laughs]
Mendel Skulski 12:51
But the overarching goal of the World Soundscape Project was that of public education. They wanted to draw attention to the ever-evolving soundscape, raising it as a priority for conversation, policy, and design. Although those involved were mostly musicians and composers, the aim of the project was to be as multidisciplinary as possible. They collected vernacular from a gamut of scientific and musical fields, and published a dictionary of terms: the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology.
Hildegard Westerkamp 13:25
To me, the handbook is symbolic for what we ultimately really wanted, was to work together with scientists. We never managed to do that. We managed to connect with architects, we managed to connect with the more progressive, maybe, acoustical engineers, who were willing to listen, who were willing to look at our work and see the significance of it. In terms of the mainstream we, I think, looked flaky to a lot of people.
Mendel Skulski 13:59
Despite that, the World Soundscape Project drew on techniques cultivated by pioneers in musique concrete and germinated an entirely new field of study and creativity using sounds from the natural environment. In composing works of music through altered soundscapes, Hildegarde could forge a new consciousness of the environment in the mind of the listener, using elements they might otherwise dismiss as unimportant. For example, crickets.
[chorus of crickets] – Cricket Song by Hildegard Westerkamp
Hildegard Westerkamp 14:57
There is this incredibly tiny animal here, and it makes this beautiful sound at night. Exploring that sound creates a bigger wonder about this animal that's significant in our environment. And I wanted to enlarge that. I wanted to exaggerate that and say, those tiny animals play just as much a part as motorbikes in our environments, if not more, and let's listen to them as clearly and openly and maybe as loudly. [laughs] It created a wonder in my self about the subtlety and beauty of that sound. And when you then listen back to the original, you have a completely different understanding. You come full circle and you begin to understand it differently. That was my motivation behind Cricket Voice. The listener doesn't necessarily know all those details. But it doesn't really matter to me.
[Growing ambient music mixed with cricket sounds]
Mendel Skulski 16:23
As the World Soundscape Project developed its pedagogy, its ideas found purchase mainly within the arts and creative professions, musicians and radio producers, creating media in a new field dubbed Acoustic Ecology. But one field begets another. Enter: soundscape ecology.
Bernie Krause 16:49
Soundscape ecology, on the other hand, is a little bit more focused. And in particular, it's focused on the study of sounds coming from different kinds of habitats.
Mendel Skulski 17:02
To introduce our next guest, I'm calling in a friend: Andrzej Kozlowski.
[Funky music begins] – Ear Candy by Sunfish Moon Light
Andrzej Kozlowski 17:08
Hey Mendel.
Mendel Skulski 17:10
Andrzej is the founder of Half Wild, a blog featuring songwriters and other creatives, and a soundscape recordist himself. He spoke with a legend in the field of soundscape ecology, so I'll let him take it from here.
[record scratch]
Andrzej Kozlowski 17:26
Okay, well, the voice you just heard is Bernie Krause. I sat down with him in Sonoma, California. As you heard, he makes a clear distinction between soundscape and acoustic ecologies. He was originally a musician, but now he practices as a scientist using unadulterated sound to study changes in the natural environment.
Bernie Krause 17:46
So, the reason that I got involved in this is because as a professional musician during the 1960s and 70s, I found myself very constrained by the work that we were doing and the ways in which we were doing that work because it always involved being inside and cloistered. I mean, we worked in studios for hours and days at a time without any access to the outside world.
[quiet ambient music involving sounds of birdsong begins as Bernie is talking and continues for the next several minutes] – Ecosystem by Jack Hertz
Mendel Skulski 18:16
[laughs] This is also an occupational hazard for podcasters.
Andrzej Kozlowski 18:19
Okay, let's let him finish.
Bernie Krause 18:21
For me, that was that was almost.. not to belabor a point, but it was almost life-threatening to me. I mean, I was feeling really quite ill as a matter of fact. And so when I changed my career in 1979, and dropped music as a profession, I tried to find a way to get outside more. And so I studied bioacoustics and got my PhD in marine bioacoustics in 1981, and have never looked back.
Andrzej Kozlowski 18:58
He spent the last 50 years in the field literally all over the globe, making more than 5000 hours of tape.
Bernie Krause 19:05
That is attended recording, meaning that I've always been present when the recordings were being made. It puts me in touch with the living world around me in ways that I can't otherwise do in an office or a home or studio or something like where we're recording right now.
Andrzej Kozlowski 19:25
And just like the artists and academics behind the World Soundscape Project, he realized that there were gaps in how we talk about sound.
[end of ambient music]
Bernie Krause 19:33
When I was writing these books and trying to describe what I was hearing, what I found was-- is there's a tremendous paucity of language to describe what we hear because we're a visual culture. So there's a lot of material describing the visual, but almost none-- just aren't very many words to describe what we hear. So I took the idea of Murray Schafer's soundscape, which is all the sound that reaches our ear, and in working with kids, I had to ask them when they went outside listen to sound, what were the sources of those different sounds? Are they mechanical sources? Are they human sources? Are they natural sources? What are the ways in which those sounds appear to you? How do you describe them? And so at one point in the late 90s, I introduced the term biophony, meaning the natural sounds that we hear, the collective sound that we hear from a particular habitat, but it's just the natural sounds. It's not anything else. It's all the bird sounds and insects, mammals, amphibians, and so on.
[Soundscapes of Frogs croaking and creek lapping]
Andrzej Kozlowski 20:54
It was at that point that Bernie began working with Stuart Gage, an entomologist from Michigan State University.
Bernie Krause 21:01
And he said, "Hey, wait a minute, there are a lot of other sources of sound that we've got to deal with here." For instance, the geophony, or the natural sounds that are non-biological. These are the first sounds heard on earth, the sounds of water and movement of the earth, waves at the ocean shore, that kind of thing. And he said, "so let's call that the geophony," and I said, "okay, we can do that."
Andrzej Kozlowski 21:27
And of course biophony and geophony leave one source of sound unaccounted for: human beings are prodigious noisemakers. Even though we're animals, much of the sounds we create just can't be reconciled as part of the biophony. The din of humanity deserves its own category.
Bernie Krause 21:47
And so let's call that anthropophony. Originally, we call an anthrophony, which is incorrect. Anthro, like anthropology, is human - so we had the wrong prefix when we first came up with that term. But we've changed it since.
Andrzej Kozlowski 22:08
Bernie refined his language even further, splitting the anthropophophy into two subclasses: the controlled sounds, such as spoken language, theatre, and music, and the chaotic or incoherent sounds, which we usually just think of as noise.
Bernie Krause 22:23
Because it has no particular information, it carries no message for us, except perhaps danger or something like that, like the sound of a fire or a siren or something.
Andrzej Kozlowski 22:34
So I actually do some field recording in my spare time. I get especially excited about amphibian and insect choruses. Since I'm usually interested in recording the biophony, incoherent human sounds can be really frustrating. It's amazing how pervasive they are, even in some of the more remote places. It can be quite hard to get a clean recording.
Mendel Skulski 22:57
Airplanes, construction, traffic, air conditioning. These are things that I barely even noticed until I have to record an interview. I thought Hildegarde put it really nicely.
Hildegard Westerkamp 23:11
Well, the unfortunate part of our listening perception is that we can block things out. We have that wonderful way of being able to concentrate on what we want to listen to and block out the rest. And a microphone doesn't do that. Right? But when we do that we spend a lot of psychological effort, really, to do that, especially if it's a noisy environment.
Mendel Skulski 23:36
Microphones can be pretty unforgiving. Anyways, take us back to Bernie. What did he uncover from all of his sonic research?
Andrzej Kozlowski 23:46
Right. So Bernie was looking at the organization of sound and the biophony, and he started to notice patterns. He heard that every habitat is composed of a unique combination of animal voices, a kind of signature in sound. But no matter which habitat he was recording in, those voices operated in similar ways. To explain it, he came up with a theory called the acoustic niche hypothesis.
Bernie Krause 24:12
When creatures began to vocalize, they needed to find bandwidth within the frequency and temporal spectrum so that they could vocalize so that their voices would be best transmitted and received. So they had to find kind of channels within the frequency spectrum where their voices could be heard and not impeded by others.
Andrzej Kozlowski 24:38
Basically, the idea is that everybody's just trying to be heard. When things are dense and noisy, like in a tropical jungle, it's a waste of energy to vocalize at the same pitch as another species. In order to distinguish themselves, animals will adapt their communication to fit in an unused band of sound. They lay claim to that acoustic niche.
Mendel Skulski 25:02
So, their niche is like their own private pitch, or frequency band, like... one animal species reserves the soprano and so another sings in the baritone.
[sounds of soprano singing and of a low pitch]
Andrzej Kozlowski 25:18
Right? And Bernie has all sorts of incredible examples. Using fairly simple software, he can isolate a frequency window in a noisy jungle recording, and easily single out the voices of individual species. Here's an unedited recording from Zimbabwe.
[Jungle recording – many different animals singing at different pitches]
Bernie Krause 25:55
But what about this guy?
[recording narrows to one voice]
Andrzej Kozlowski 26:05
Or these bats, who occupy the highest frequency bands and whose vocalizations have been pitch-adjusted here to fall within our hearing range.
[Chirp of bats is isolated from the other voices]
Or these birds?
[sound of jungle birds]
Bernie Krause 26:30
What about this little guy right smack in the middle?
[dense insect chirping]
Mendel Skulski 26:45
Woah. That is wild.
Andrzej Kozlowski 26:48
I was completely floored by this. When you see the waveforms on the screen, it's even more obvious how distinct each of these animals is in its niche. [jungle sounds fade away] But there are lots of natural habitats that aren't nearly as densely voiced as this tropical jungle. In places where the soundscape is a little roomier, where bandwidth is a little less scarce, another aspect of the acoustic niche hypothesis becomes more apparent.
Bernie Krause 27:13
So you have both temporal and frequency niches, where a creature would interfere with another in terms of frequency. Perhaps it would wait until that other first creature stopped vocalizing and then it would pick a time to come in to fill that niche.
[Frogs croaking transitions to a chorus of birds]
Andrzej Kozlowski 27:30
This is probably pretty familiar if you've ever heard frogs chirping at dusk and a chorus of birds at dawn. There's less pressure to use a narrow frequency band, if you can just talk in shifts. Basically, the acoustic niche hypothesis describes how animals are always trying to minimize how much their songs overlap with their neighbours, both in terms of pitch and time.
Mendel Skulski 27:55
Nice.
Andrzej Kozlowski 27:56
Yeah, it's really elegant. And sometimes sonic niches incorporate the physical environment as well. Bernie played me a clip of a troop of baboons that were using huge granite outcroppings to their advantage.
Bernie Krause 28:08
They found this echoey spot in the forest that's only for them. And listen to this - sounds like... somebody accused me of doing a very strange mix, but I didn't do any mix at all. These guys are doing it on their own.
[Wildlife noises]
Watch what happens when the baboon comes in. Right here.
[Baboon noises enter and echo amid wildlife noises]
Mendel Skulski 28:57
[laughs] Wow. Speaking as a fellow primate that, that sounds like a lot of fun.
Andrzej Kozlowski 29:06
Yeah, there's no doubt that we love to hear our own echo. It's interesting to think about how resonant spaces like these, places like caves, might have first encouraged humans to sequester our own sounds from the rest of the natural world. How did the anthropophony first cleave off from the biophony? Regardless, the sounds of the anthropophony are now overwhelming the biophony.
[Bird song in the background]
Bernie Krause 29:32
The problem, the big problem now is human noise. And a lot of it is like full frequency range.
Andrzej Kozlowski 29:42
A handful of animals have been observed to adapt to our cacophony, a few birds in particular. But by and large, as the anthropophony expands, what Bernie describes as the great animal orchestra falls silent.
[bird song is cut off suddently]
Having gathered digital audio for decades, Bernie's collection represents a library of snapshots, an historical index of biodiversity from around the world.
Hildegard Westerkamp 30:08
Because he's made so many-- Bernie has made so many recordings over the years, there are now some recordings where he has comparisons between what happened in the 90s, what happened in 2004, 2000-whatever. And there's some very dramatic examples of drought, loss of water, loss of birdsong. It's totally dramatic when you hear it. This is really important work, the fact that these sound examples exist and that they can be studied now. That bioacousticians, biologists can go back in time and begin to look at, you know, what's been happening.
Andrzej Kozlowski 30:50
What's been happening. We can basically sum it up as habitat loss and disruption and climate change.
Mendel Skulski 30:57
Yeah, not to put too fine a point on it.
Bernie Krause 31:02
We can't ascribe directly - because we don't have enough information yet, we don't have enough data - the correlation between that drop off and climate change. Gotta be really, really careful about that because people will ding us really hard.
Andrzej Kozlowski 31:19
But one thing is beyond question. Over 50% of Bernie's archive comes from habitats that are now silent.
Bernie Krause 31:26
You can go there and try to record but you won't be able to get any sound, living sound, from any living animal.
Mendel Skulski 31:38
I guess the best time to start recording your environment is, like, yesterday. We can hear what's out there, even if we can't see it. And the more we know about what's out there, the more we can do to prevent its loss.
Andrzej Kozlowski 31:55
Absolutely. And soundscape ecologists have developed techniques using modern recording and data storage technology to monitor ecosystems. This is called bioacoustic monitoring.
Bernie Krause 32:07
With digital equipment, we can record long periods of time and capture huge amounts of material and data. And we have ways of storing it very cheaply. And that's called remote monitoring. And that's by taking these small pieces of equipment that are in the $700-800 range and, you know, tying them to trees and walking away and coming back a month later and picking up the data and storing it and analyzing it. I mean, there's no way to do it, from a human perspective, we've got to use algorithms that are created on computers that can handle huge amounts of data, that analyzes this material.
Andrzej Kozlowski 32:47
It's powerful stuff, but that kind of unattended remote recording is not Bernie's main interest. Much of his work is kind of a bridge from the art world to the world of hard science. His soundscapes are meant to be accessible, listened to, meditated on. It's not an exercise in just data collection.
Mendel Skulski 33:07
That's all right. We've still got one more guest on this episode. And one more co-host. Hey, Simone, are you still there?
Simone Miller 33:17
Hey, yeah, I'm here.
Mendel Skulski 33:20
Simone Miller, everyone. You've actually heard her once already in this episode. Simone, care to remind them?
Simone Miller 33:28
Sure. You are now listening to season two of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 33:33
Simone is an associate producer here on Future Ecologies. She's been working with us since the summer. It's really nice to officially introduce you.
Simone Miller 33:42
Yeah, thanks. It's nice to come out from behind the scenes.
Mendel Skulski 33:45
Definitely. So, tell us: where is this episode going next?
Simone Miller 33:51
Well, next we're traveling to a subtropical island chain, the Ryukyu archipelago. Our destination is the largest of these islands. It's just about halfway between Japan and Taiwan. We are going to Okinawa.
[Electronic ambient music] – Casablanca by Jack Hertz
Nick Friedman 34:18
Hi, my name is Nick Friedman, and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Simone Miller 34:26
This is a newly established university. It's only been around since 2011. It also goes by OIST for short.
Mendel Skulski 34:33
OIST.
Simone Miller 34:34
[laughs] Yeah. And at OIST Nick works in collaboration with a group called OKEON, or the Okinawa Environmental Observation Network. OKEON relies on both academic researchers and citizen scientists to collect data about the health of the island's ecosystems. Specifically, Nick is leading the Ryukyu Soundscapes Project.
Nick Friedman 34:59
The Ryukyu Soundscapes Project is a project to record soundscapes from across Okinawa and the Ryukyu archipelago, and using them to understand the biodiversity of life that lives in this area, and to understand how human activity might affect that biodiversity.
Simone Miller 35:21
Unlike Hildegard and Bernie, who both came from musical backgrounds, Nick's interest in acoustics stems from his passion for birds, and trying to trace evolutionary patterns in their songs. Coming to Okinawa and hearing all the endemic species was pretty exciting for him. He'd already heard of OKEON, so he proposed to add acoustic monitoring to their roster of projects.
Nick Friedman 35:43
Listening to a soundscape, I'm already, as an ornithologist, trying to identify every bird that I hear. And so, finding digital ways to do that was a way to save everyone time. And if you can abstract this somehow, if you can figure out what mathematical components of the soundscape, how they relate to biodiversity, then that can simplify doing these biodiversity assessments all around the world.
Simone Miller 36:13
So to test this out, they've set up 24 sound monitoring sites across the island, in places with varying degrees of human disturbance. Like Bernie was saying earlier, these field recorders are literally just strapped to trees. Through OKEON, Nick and other OIST researchers are able to get permission to put their recorders on private property. Since the university is so new, the grounds are pretty small. And for this kind of research, they want to cover as much of the island as possible. Doing this sort of acoustic monitoring has been theorized for a long time. But Nick and the Ryukyu Soundscapes Project are among the first to actually put it into practice.
Nick Friedman 36:53
So I'm not super interested in developing methods. One of the reasons for that is that the last 10 years of the literature... when I first got into this I was looking for a paper that did what I wanted to do. And I couldn't find one, because most of the papers were identifying a new method or improving on an old method and saying, oh, here's how you would do a biodiversity assessment using soundscapes if you were to do that. And I couldn't find anyone actually doing the thing. But I actually like animals and wanted to go in the forest and do this thing. So, that's what we're doing. Because this is something that we weren't able to do 5, 10, 20 years ago: the technology wasn't really there to collect this much data, and process it efficiently. You know, when I first started doing ornithology, people were still getting recordings on magnetic tape, and then digitizing that, and then complaining about how much better the magnetic tape was. And so to go from that, to just having these recorders that are on in the forest all the time...
Simone Miller 38:00
We're talking big data. Nick has collected over 120 terabytes to date. Every year of data that the project collects would take decades for anyone to actually listen to.
Mendel Skulski 38:12
Sounds like they could use some robots.
Simone Miller 38:15
Yep, that's right. Nick and his team have developed two different ways to break down the data. The first is a tool called the soundscape index, which is kind of an approximation of the acoustic niche hypothesis. I'll oversimplify, but essentially they analyze the sound spectrum for different frequencies. From there, they have a reasonable idea of how many different species are active in the area, and how diverse those species are. These soundscape indices are a way to understand the character of a soundscape without actually listening to it.
Mendel Skulski 38:50
So, it's kind of a rating system. Like, the computer doesn't tell you what is living there. Just how much living going on.
Simone Miller 39:01
Exactly.
Nick Friedman 39:03
And the other method... I actually want to know what some of these species are, because they're interesting to me. We can use this method to pull out the vocalizations from a particular species We can teach the computer to think like a bird watcher. And then the computer can go through the recordings much faster than a human being, and identify where it heard this bird.
[end of ambient music]
Simone Miller 39:28
That's right. It's machine learning time. It's not just digital audio gear that's finally up to the task. It's also the data analytics.
Nick Friedman 39:38
So it would take me the rest of my natural lifespan to actually listen to each of these recordings and write down what birds I heard. I don't want to do that. So instead, I use this approach to teach the computer how to recognize the birds. Then I install that recognition model on our supercomputer. The supercomputer then chugs through it.
Simone Miller 40:04
In fact, it's not just Nick teaching the computer. OIST invited local birdwatchers of all ages to help identify the bird calls that the Ryukyu Soundscapes Project had recorded. But naming each of the species is only the beginning. They have to keep the training wheels on for a little while. They supervise the machine learning to make sure it's actually matching the right bird with the right call. And this is laborious.
Nick Friedman 40:30
Have you ever wanted to listen to like 30,000 crow sounds in a day, just like... just over and over again?
[Several different crow calls in quick succession]
Mendel Skulski 40:39
No, thank you.
Simone Miller 40:40
[laughs] Yeah, me neither, but they've been rewarded for their efforts. In particular, the project has resulted in a heap of data about a rare endemic bird called the Yanbaru Kuina. This flightless bird is seen so rarely it was only confirmed to exist in 1978.
[Yanbaru Kuina bird calls]
Nick Friedman 40:53
This is the Okinawan rail. And it is one of the most rare species on the island. I've seen them like maybe twice, and usually it's like the tail end running into the bushes. But they're super noisy, and I totally didn't imagine that. They're actually super noisy little birds. And that makes them really easy to track using this system. Being able to confirm that the Yanbaru Kuina is present in a lot of the places we expected it to be was really cool for me, and especially being able to go through these recordings and find it consistently is great.
Simone Miller 41:52
Most of the project's results so far have been really helpful in tracking what species are living where and learning about their activity level over the course of the day and night. But the big picture questions are still kind of up in the air.
Nick Friedman 42:09
Anthropogenic noise have encroached to a certain extent on animal communication. And this can become an issue for animals that are trying to communicate, especially at low frequencies. They have to sort of pitch their songs up a little bit, and that can take more energy. It can change what the song means physiologically to the receiver of that signal. It does sort of rewire the set of acoustic niches. But how exactly it does that is not entirely understood. When you have different interruptions of sound, and whether those interruptions of sound are a cicada starting to sing, or whether it's a truck going past, what are these animals do to compensate... and over long periods of time, do they evolve new strategies to get around this problem. But I want to understand is how that human disturbance influences animal communication, and overall biodiversity. These are questions I'm still trying to answer. [laughs]
Mendel Skulski 43:16
So, it sounds like it's kind of a waiting game. Like, they'll have to record long enough to be able to actually observe those changes in the wild. And science is rigorous and nature is messy. They'll have to see those same changes a handful of times, at least, to actually draw those conclusions.
Simone Miller 43:39
Yeah, definitely. But maybe it doesn't have to take so long. Nick doesn't want this work to be done in isolation. They want other environmental monitoring researchers to link their data together to substantiate each other's results and learn to listen to the planet as a whole.
Nick Friedman 44:02
I think what we'd like to see happen is to connect this system of biodiversity monitoring in Okinawa to monitoring systems around the world, so that we can tell what's happening to the pulse of the planet. As climate change is disrupting our ecosystems, as global change in general is having more of an effect, what does that do to our ecosystem in Okinawa, and how does that compare to other ecosystems?
Simone Miller 44:31
And the more scientists that can act in collaboration, the sooner we can answer those big picture questions.
Mendel Skulski 44:37
But we don't need to wait for science to happen to start caring about our sonic environment. We just need to start paying attention to it. Forget the microphone, just go for a walk and focus on listening. Hildegard has been advocating for exactly this kind of soundwalking since the 1970s.
Hildegard Westerkamp 45:01
You don't forget the place where you've gone on a soundwalk, you remember that place. We've done many soundwalks in Vancouver as part of the Vancouver Soundwalk Collective. And I just remember the various places really well and that's the experience for everyone else: it becomes a conscious place. Little details that we've noticed there, little interactions... it becomes a place of a relationship that you have with it. You create relationships when you're listening. While the listening sense and the sounding world naturally forces us to be in the present. If we attend to sound, and we attend to listening, we can't help being in the present. It slows us down. And there's something very grounding in that act.
Simone Miller 45:59
That really resonates with me. And in some ways we can make use of recording to let other people in on that relationship. Like Andrzej and Hildegard said earlier, data libraries of soundscape recordings can allow biologists, bioacousticians, and even the everyday person to hear what a certain area sounded like years ago, to witness the way the sound of a place can change. And that's a very useful and powerful thing. This huge archive that the Ryukyu Soundscapes Project has created... it's like a time capsule.
Nick Friedman 46:40
You know, we can preserve these soundscapes for future generations that want to find out what it was like to be on Okinawa, at this particular time. But that's one thing we don't really have from the past is, you know, before there were recording equipment, how do you figure out what a place sounded like? You know, what did Okinawa sound like 200 years ago? So I think having these recordings available gives us the biological context in which the animals we study lived during this time. But it also can give us some cultural context, like, what were people doing then? You can hear all these cars going by, and airplanes, and sometimes you can hear people singing during festivals. And I think this is all part of what it's like to experience this time and place.
Andrzej Kozlowski 47:33
But there's already so much sound in the world. I think that sometimes we need to distill it a little to make something that we can really get meaning from.
Mendel Skulski 47:41
So like music?
Andrzej Kozlowski 47:43
Sure, call it music, or electro-acoustic composition, or a podcast. All of the animals we've talked about don't find their niche at random. First, they listen to the sounds around them and then hear where they can fit. Bernie told me about several Indigenous peoples that make music in concert with the sounds of the forest, the Jivaro, the Yanomami, and the Bayaka in particular. They participate in the sound of nature.
Bernie Krause 48:15
And then the human voice becomes part of the biophony.
[Bayaka voices singing with the biophony] – Women Gathering Mushrooms recorded by Louis Sarno
Mendel Skulski 48:31
So, before we go, I'd just like to decompress a bit with you two. There's kind of a theme to each of these guests, Hildegarde and Bernie and Nick, where they're all fascinated by sound. But really, how they can do what they do is always mediated by technology, right? Like through recording technology or editing software or computer algorithms. These are the things that kind of drew them onto the paths that they're on now. I guess what I'm wondering is, if these technologies are kind of a fascination of their own, or if you think they actually allow us to truly listen more deeply.
Simone Miller 49:19
It's a really good question. I remember in the interview with Hildegard, one thing that she said really stuck out to me, was that when you are listening, we cannot help but to selectively listen. Our brain naturally edits out things that it doesn't perceive to be important or that we don't necessarily need to pay attention to. So we are constantly, without being aware of it, editing the soundscapes that we are in and all of the different noises that we are experiencing.
Andrzej Kozlowski 49:56
Yeah, I think... I mean, for me, I would certainly not want to just live in the world, in a world mediated by technology. But the technology, particularly when you experience it the way that Bernie Krause describes his preference for experiencing it, which is, you know, attended soundscape recording... It really converts you into this sort of bat-eared fox. You know, it's a type of fox that has these massive ears? And this is what's so incredible about sitting in the woods and actually being present with the, you know, feeling the wind on your face, feeling... smelling the odors of the earth and the trees... and being able to just experience everything in stark relief. It kind of accentuates things that you otherwise wouldn't be aware of.
Simone Miller 50:55
When you're listening back to a recording you're actually forced to engage with all of the different layers of sound and everything that's going on in the soundscape. I think that listening is something that needs to be learned. And it's something that's very difficult to learn because we have to work to override our own methods of editing. And technology, as Hildegard put it, is kind of a way that allows us to get around that and learn how to not edit out certain things, how to pay attention to certain things that we otherwise wouldn't be aware of.
Andrzej Kozlowski 51:39
Yeah, I love how recording in the woods forces you into the presence of the biophony. So it's kind of like a tutor, it's kind of like a coach that helps us remember our part in the larger ecosystem. Certainly I'm an advocate for experiencing nature not mediated through technology. Absolutely, that is a must. But I think we have a tendency, perhaps, to favor certain types of sound. And when we're listening through it, this particular kind of technological medium, we are exposed to the full range of sounds reaching us and things come to our attention and into our consciousness that otherwise wouldn't. You know, even the sound of a beetle scurrying through leaves, you would never pick up that sound. So it just basically expands your awareness beyond belief. And then you go back into the woods with this new awareness not mediated through technology.
Mendel Skulski 52:39
Yeah, it's funny. I actually heard a plant grow one time, just every few seconds as it was... these tiny little growth spurts were rustling this leaf, like a little megaphone for this tiny plant. And it was just amazing to me to realize: if we stay quiet and we pay attention, the sort of things that can enter our perception, so long as we make ourselves available to it.
Simone Miller 53:10
I think that in this way, technology is giving us back something that we may have lost or something we may have forgotten. And giving us tools to move forwards in learning how to better be aware of all of the layers of our world that we are interacting with on a daily basis without even knowing.
[Long silence followed by sudden music] – The Free Woman by Sunfish Moon Light
Mendel Skulski 53:40
Thank you for listening. This episode of Future Ecologies was produced by me, Mendel Skulski.
Andrzej Kozlowski 53:47
And me, Andre Kozlowski.
Simone Miller 53:49
And me, Simone Miller.
Mendel Skulski 53:50
...with help from Adam Huggins. In this episode, you heard Hildegard Westerkamp, Bernie Krause, and Nick Friedman. You can hear more of their work at hildegardwesterkamp.ca, wildsanctuary.com, and okeon.unit.oist.jp
Special thanks to Jenny Shine, Barry Truax, Wreford Miller, Deblekha Guin and the Access to Media Education Society, Gael McCool, David Abram, and Katie Lukes.
Soundscapes and music in this episode were produced by Hildegard Westerkamp, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Vortichez, Sunfish Moon Light. Excerpts from Directions, by Peter Huse and the World Soundscape Project's Soundscapes of Canada, Jack Hertz, Andrzej Kozlowski, Bernie Krause, the Ryukyu Soundscapes Project, and Louis Sarno, courtesy of Wild Sanctuary. You can find a full list of credits, citations, and more on our website: futureecologies.net.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay what you can as little as $1 a month to get access to bonus monthly mini episodes, stickers, patches, and more. This season, I'm guiding a tour of mushrooms and the kingdom fungi. Head over to patreon.com/futureecologies. You can get in touch with us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Inaturalist. The handle is always futureecologies.
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Simone Miller 53:52
[whispering] You are now listening to Ecologies ASMR.
Mendel Skulski 55:42
[whispering] Hey. This is still Mendel, only now I'm whispering. If you've already let any of our other episodes from season two play through to the end, then you've already noticed this little easter egg that we've called Future Ecologies ASMR. We've used the segment feature a different fruit on each episode. But in our enthusiasm for eating fruit, we totally forgot that we were trying to do an ASMR bit. So I'm sorry if you felt tricked or startled by unexpected sounds. We were just excited about having a space in each episode to be especially silly. We are really grateful to get feedback about our work. I wouldn't be whispering this to you if a good friend hadn't spoken up. So please get in touch with me anytime at mendel@futureecologies.net
[still whispering] Anyway, this is a tamarind.
[Lengthy tamarind ASMR]
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Emma Morgan-Thorp