The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places by Krause, Bernie. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780316086875.

A beautifully lyrical memoir and examination of natural music that will leave you hearing—and seeing—nature as never before. "A passionate amalgam of science and autobiography." —New York Times Book Review Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the worlds leading experts in natural sound, and hes spent his life discovering and recording natures rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern worlds honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth. Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes arent vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged. From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales-whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours-to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africas Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planets deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm. The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one mans pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources—the music of the wild.