Educational Media Reviews Online

This short program introduces narrator Bernie Krause, a musician, sound engineer and scientist who has traveled the world to record both animal and inanimate natural sounds. He coined the word ‘Biophony’ to describe animal sounds as a group and helped to create the scientific discipline of Soundscape Ecology (which studies biological, geological and anthropological sounds in landscapes and encourages conserving natural sounds in their original landscapes). He has produced more than two dozen CDs featuring natural sounds and his book, The Great Animal Orchestra (2012, with an online soundtrack) received wide critical approval. Last year, Yale University Press published his Voices of the Wild (also with an online soundtrack) and this video under review appeared. In the works is an updated edition of his 2002 Wild Soundscapes, also from Yale, already with 22 tracks freely available at the publisher’s website. Krause has collaborated with composer Richard Blackford to create “The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony” and “Biophony,” a score for choreographer Alonzo King’s expressive Alonzo King LINES Ballet company, from which excepts of both are used in this program, along with Krause’s TED talk from 2013. Bernie Krause really wants people to “open our ears to the natural world around us.” He is briefly shown here playing recordings of natural sounds in a high school classroom but the major focus of the program is how the Arctic Soundscape Project Team (Dr. Kevin Colver, Frank Keim, Andy Keller, Dr, Bernie Krause,Bob Moore, Martyn Stewart, Robert Thompson, the USFWS Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) worked on collecting natural sounds in the far north. Video content and quality is high and the soundtrack is enticing, including wind, water, and ice (geophony), animals vocalizing and moving around (biophony), as well as scientists and acousticians dedicatedly describing their work (anthrophony). A worthwhile sampling of Krause’s biography and field of study.