The Great Animal Orchestra: Voices from the Wild A text by Bernie Krause

Since the 1960s, Bernie Krause has traveled the world recording and archiving the sounds of marine and terrestrial organisms and their unique habitats. His natural soundscape collection consists of more than 5,000 hours of complete habitat recordings consisting of over 15,000 identified species. Working at various research sites, he identified the concept of biophony based on the relationships of individual creatures to the total biological soundscape. His discoveries have helped form the basis of the new scientific disciplines, soundscape ecology, and ecoacoustics. Currently, Dr. Krause devotes his time transforming his field data into large scale works of sound art for public spaces such as The Great Animal Orchestra and The Night Would Not Be Night Without the Cricket (for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, in 2016 and 2025). Bernie Krause is also the author of three books: The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), Voices of the Wild (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), and Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).