Bernie Krause

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Bernie Krause

Bernie Krause, actually Bernhard L. Krause (born December 8, 1938 in Detroit , Michigan ) is an American musician, natural scientist and sound scientist. He is a pioneer of electronic music and field recording (German for example sound recordings in the open field ) and is regarded as a leading expert in the research and documentation of natural soundscapes. In his words, he discovered “the great orchestra of animals” - for him the sources of the music lie in the original soundscapes of nature. On worldwide trips he collected over 15,000 recordings of animal sounds in 45 years and recorded so-called soundscapes ( soundscapes or sound images ) of around 4000 hours of playback time in untouched natural habitats . Around half of the habitats he visited and documented no longer exist.

Today Bernie Krause lives with his wife Katherine near San Francisco in Sonoma County , where his sound archive Wild Sanctuary is also located. He undertakes reading and lecture tours on his "acoustic niche theory" and the "Soundscape Ecology" ( ecology of sound landscapes ).

Life

Bernie Krause began playing the violin at the age of three and a half, and began taking classical composition lessons at the age of four and a half . He also played the piano , harp , bass and cello . At the age of thirteen he switched to what would become his main instrument, the guitar .

At seventeen he tried to study classical guitar , a subject that was not yet established in the USA in the early 1950s. Instead, he decided to study Latin American history and philosophy at Michigan University . He also worked as a studio musician in a wide variety of genres, including the first recordings of Motown . After graduating, he stayed in Boston for some time at MIT and worked in a music agency. Here he met Pete Seeger , who hired him for his band The Weavers , in which he played until they broke up in 1964.

Krause then moved to California , where he met the jazz musician and concert organist Paul Beaver , who had also found access to electronic music through his work with the theremin . In 1964 the two met the inventor of the synthesizer Robert Moog and bought one of the first devices from him. At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 they successfully presented the synthesizer and its sonic possibilities. B. sold a copy to the Byrds and were subsequently involved in countless productions by various bands as specialists in serving it. They worked for the Monkees , the Byrds and the Doors , among others . In 1969, with the acoustic introduction to the synthesizer The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music, Beaver & Krause recorded their first album, four more albums of electronic music followed.

In the seventies, Bernie Krause was mainly active as a composer, sound engineer and sound designer. He has worked on the soundtracks of countless films, including classic films such as Roman Polański's Rosemary's Baby and Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola . From 1979 Krause published numerous other albums under his own name with a focus on field recordings , sound recordings in the great outdoors.

Over recordings of sound material for the joint albums with Beaver, Krause also came to field recordings of natural sounds, which after Beaver's sudden death in 1975 increasingly became his most important subject. He eventually went back to university for a PhD in bioacoustics with a comparative thesis on the voices of killer whales in captivity and in the wild. On numerous trips around the world since the 1980s he has been documenting natural soundscapes that are as original as possible with his recordings and archiving them in his sound archive.

Study area

In 1983 he had a key experience in Kenya in the Masai Mara nature reserve :

“It was then that I realized that this wasn't a mess at all! What I heard was an elegant interplay of sounds, an orchestrated arrangement of the sounds of insects, frogs and toads; spotted hyenas, eagle owls, African tawny owls, elephants, tree slippers and lions roaring in the distance. Every single voice, it seemed to me, had exactly its right place in the acoustic bandwidth, in this fine fabric of all frequencies. "

- Bernie Krause : The wild biophonic world of the artist-scientist Bernie Krause. Radio feature by Michael Langer, Deutschlandfunk 12./13. April 2014

differentiation

Krause expands Murray Schafer's soundscape concept by a differentiated consideration and categorization of the various sound sources. According to Krause, the natural soundscapes consist of the

  • “ Anthropophonie ” ( anthropos, man), which comprises the sounds and noises made by man and his culture, the
  • " Biophonie " ( bio, life), the vocalizations of all non-human living beings as well as the
  • " Geophony " (from the ancient Greek geo, earth and phonos, sound), the sound and noises produced by the earth or its elements, such as wind, sea, etc.

Practically all areas of the world are now influenced by the sounds of civilization. Each animal has its very own, individual sound signature, and accordingly all biotopes have their own sound profiles. These differed z. B. according to density and type of vegetation , geological composition, weather and season . By analyzing these sound profiles, conclusions can be drawn about the condition of the biotopes. From the recordings, Krause creates spectrograms that resemble modern graphic scores or the notation of symphonies .

Publications

Albums (selection)

Books (selection)

  • The great animal orchestra: finding the origins of music in the world's wild places. London, Profile 2012; German The great orchestra of animals. From the origin of music in nature. Munich, Kunstmann 2013. Manfred Miersch: info-netz-musik: Review , August 22, 2014

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Krause, Bernie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musician, natural scientist and sound scientist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Detroit , Michigan , United States