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    The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places
    Unavailable
    The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places
    Unavailable
    The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Published by Hachette Audio

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    About this audiobook

    Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's 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 aren't 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 Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm.

    The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMar 19, 2012
    ISBN9781611137095

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    Reviews for The Great Animal Orchestra

    4/5

    18 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting book on how music exists in the natural world. It jumps around a bit and could have some better organizational structure, but the writing is well-done and the concept is interesting and one I hadn't heard before: by tracking the animal sounds various biomes produce, over time you can determine how well the area is doing. The author did some sound recordings of a forest before and after it was selectively logged. While it looked the same after, the recordings showed a drastic drop in number and species of animals. This will get you thinking about how essential sound is to wildlife and their environments and how it hopefully provides another tool to use in fighting for the natural spaces.
    • 4/5
      Interesting
    • 4/5
      Fascinating book on the aural soundscape that we have all around us, and are sadly now loosing.

      Krause has recored 15,000 hours of natural sounds in his time, and has cherry picked the best of them.

      He uses his data to show that even selective logging in a forest can have massive devastation of the wildlife, and just how much difference noise pollution can make
    • 3/5
      Quite interesting, although a bit repetitious, when discussing soundscapes (geophony, biophony, anthrophony) & the bioacoustic recordings & logs that the author has made over the past 40 years. This is Krause's area of expertise & he elucidates it well. The book is less compelling when the author extrapolates from his experience & data to make assessments and broad judgements about wildness & nature in relation to homo sapiens. For example, he talks about a wild pre-modern Amazon rainforest without acknowledging recent scholarship regarding the probable human role in creating & nurturing those forests' unparallelled abundance & diversity. Throughout, he vacillates between placing humans in opposition to and including them within Nature. He doesn't make enough of a distinction between the anthrophony produced by the human voice & other physiological interactions with the environment & that produced by human-made machinery, electronics, etc. Again, we are part of & other than at the same time. He also doesn't mention global overpopulation as a contributing factor in the disproportionate impact of human activity on other species. Instead he focuses solely on the activities themselves. It is at least possible that, even if every existing human being were to return to a more "natural" way of living in harmony with his or her surroundings, human beings' sheer force of numbers would still adversely affect other species.