When I started recording the sounds of nature 45 years ago, I was amazed to discover that even ants, insect larvae, and viruses have their own unique sound signatures. Every wild habitat, like the Amazon rainforest, creates a lively orchestra of sounds from insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. Each soundscape is a unique expression of the life within it, filled with valuable information. Today, I want to share some of that information with you.
Soundscapes are composed of three main elements. The first is geophony, which includes non-biological sounds like wind, water, and the Earth’s movements. The second is biophony, the sounds produced by living organisms in a habitat. The third is anthrophony, the sounds humans create. While some of these sounds are organized, like music, most are chaotic and considered noise.
Initially, I thought wild soundscapes were insignificant. However, I learned that listening carefully provides crucial insights into the health of a habitat. In the late ’60s, recordings focused on individual species, but this was like trying to appreciate Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by listening to just one violin. Fortunately, more institutions now use holistic approaches to soundscape ecology, a field I helped pioneer.
Recording has become more challenging due to global warming, resource extraction, and human noise. It used to take 10 hours to capture an hour of usable material; now, it can take over a thousand hours. Half of my archive comes from habitats so altered that their original sounds are lost.
Traditionally, habitats were assessed by visually counting species. However, by analyzing soundscapes, we can more accurately determine the health of an ecosystem. Let me show you some examples.
Lincoln Meadow, located in the Sierra Nevada mountains, is a place I’ve recorded for many years. In 1988, a logging company claimed that selective logging would have no environmental impact. I recorded the area before and after logging to establish a baseline. The spectrograms showed that while the stream’s sound remained, the bird sounds disappeared after logging. Despite appearances, the soundscape revealed a significant impact on the habitat.
Animals express themselves through sound. For example, in Alaska, I recorded sea anemones making static-like sounds when they couldn’t find food. Similarly, the Great Basin spadefoot toad uses synchronized chorusing to find mates and avoid predators. However, human noise, like jet flybys, can disrupt these natural patterns, making animals vulnerable.
In another poignant example, a colleague recorded a male beaver mourning the loss of its family after a dam was destroyed. This heartbreaking sound illustrates that animals can express emotions, a topic some biologists find controversial.
Soundscapes offer a deeper understanding of the natural world, revealing the impact of human activities and the importance of preserving habitats. While visual observations provide limited perspectives, soundscapes offer a 360-degree view, enriching our connection to nature. As we listen, we gain insights into the natural sources of our lives and the secrets of our humanity.
In conclusion, soundscapes are invaluable in understanding our world. They remind us of the beauty and complexity of nature, urging us to listen and learn from the voices of the natural world.
Engage in a hands-on workshop where you will analyze different soundscapes using audio editing software. Identify the three elements of soundscapes: geophony, biophony, and anthrophony. Discuss how these elements interact and what they reveal about the health of a habitat.
Participate in a field trip to a local natural area to record soundscapes. Use recording equipment to capture the sounds of various habitats. Later, compare your recordings with those from altered environments to understand the impact of human activities on natural soundscapes.
Research a specific habitat and present a case study on how soundscapes have been used to assess its ecological health. Use examples like Lincoln Meadow to illustrate the effects of environmental changes and human interference on natural soundscapes.
Create a soundscape composition that represents a specific ecosystem. Use a mix of geophony, biophony, and anthrophony to tell a story about the habitat. Share your composition with the class and discuss the ecological messages conveyed through sound.
Engage in a debate about the role of sound in animal communication and emotion. Discuss examples from the article, such as the mourning beaver or the spadefoot toad, and explore the implications of human noise on animal behavior and communication.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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[Music] [Applause] When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, and viruses created a sound signature, but they do. Every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you’re hearing behind me, produces a vibrant animal orchestra. This is an instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. Each soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, containing incredible amounts of information. It’s some of that information I want to share with you today.
The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. The first is the geophony, or the non-biological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, and the movement of the Earth. The second is the biophony, which is all the sound generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. The third is the sound that we humans generate, called anthrophony. Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some refer to as noise.
There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact; they were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. When I began recording in the late ’60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to capturing individual species, mostly birds in the beginning, but later mammals and amphibians. This was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra.
Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material good enough for an album, film soundtrack, or museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, it can take up to a thousand hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50% of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they’re either altogether silent or no longer heard in their original form.
The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I’m able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe.
This is Lincoln Meadow, located a 3.5-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada mountains at about 2,000 meters altitude. I’ve been recording there for many years. In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called selective logging—taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses under strict protocols to establish a baseline.
This is an example of a spectrogram, a graphic illustration of sound over time. In this case, 15 seconds is represented from left to right, with frequency from the bottom to the top, lowest to highest. You can see that the signature of a stream is represented in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. A year later, I returned and recorded under the same conditions. This is what we found after selective logging. The stream is still represented in the bottom third, but notice what’s missing in the top two-thirds.
I’ve returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density, and diversity of that biophony have not yet returned to what it was before the operation. From the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company’s contention that there was no environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story.
Young students often ask me what these animals are saying, and while I don’t have all the answers, I can tell you that they do express themselves. I was walking along the shore in Alaska and came across a tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones. Curious to see if any of them made noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, into the water. The creature began to absorb the microphone, and its tentacles searched for something to eat. The static-like sounds you hear now are very low, but when it didn’t find anything to eat, I think that’s an expression that could be understood in any language.
At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hardpan desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are right for it to emerge again. When there’s enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around large vernal pools in great numbers, vocalizing in a chorus that’s absolutely in sync with one another. They do this for two reasons: first, competitively, as they’re looking for mates, and second, cooperatively, as vocalizing in sync makes it difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes, and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it’s in a healthy pattern.
Mono Lake is just east of Yosemite National Park in California and is a favorite habitat of these toads. It’s also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots who train in their fighters, flying at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers per hour and altitudes only a couple of hundred meters above ground level. The human noise, even though it’s 6 to 12 kilometers from the frog pond, masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all the energy that was once present is gone in the top end, with breaks in the chorusing at 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5 seconds, followed by the sound of the jet.
At the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that with habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations that were diminishing during the 1980s and early ’90s have mostly returned to normal.
I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It’s a very sad story, but it illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion—a controversial subject among some biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around a pond formed about 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, partly by a beaver dam that held the ecosystem together in a delicate balance. One afternoon, while he was recording, a couple of game wardens appeared and, for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam and blew it up, killing the female and her young. Horrified, my colleague remained behind to gather his thoughts and record whatever he could. That evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles, crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I’ve ever heard coming from any organism, human or otherwise.
[Music] There are many facets to soundscapes, including the ways in which animals teach us to dance and sing, which I’ll discuss another time. You’ve heard how biophony helps clarify our understanding of the natural world and the impact of resource extraction, human noise, and habitat destruction. While environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a fuller understanding can be gained from what we hear. Biophony and geophony are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we’re endowed with a sense of place—the true story of the world we live in.
In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture implicitly frames a limited perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures. Our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity.
And the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. [Music] Thank you for listening. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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This version removes any explicit content and maintains the essence of the original transcript while ensuring clarity and coherence.
Soundscapes – The acoustic environment as perceived by humans, consisting of natural and anthropogenic sounds. – Example sentence: Researchers are studying soundscapes to understand the impact of noise pollution on wildlife behavior.
Biophony – The collective sound that is produced by all living organisms in a given environment. – Example sentence: The biophony of the rainforest is dominated by the calls of birds and insects, creating a rich tapestry of sound.
Geophony – The natural sounds generated by non-biological sources in a given environment, such as wind, rain, and thunder. – Example sentence: The geophony of the coastal region includes the rhythmic crashing of waves and the rustling of palm leaves.
Anthrophony – The sounds produced by human activities, including industrial noise, transportation, and urban development. – Example sentence: Urban planners are considering the impact of anthrophony on local wildlife when designing new city parks.
Habitat – The natural environment in which a particular species lives and grows. – Example sentence: Conservation efforts are focused on preserving the wetland habitat essential for the survival of many amphibian species.
Ecosystem – A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. – Example sentence: The coral reef ecosystem supports a diverse range of marine life and is crucial for maintaining ocean health.
Global Warming – The long-term rise in Earth’s average surface temperature due to human activities, particularly the emission of greenhouse gases. – Example sentence: Global warming is leading to the melting of polar ice caps, which threatens to raise sea levels worldwide.
Resource Extraction – The process of withdrawing natural resources from the environment for human use, often leading to environmental degradation. – Example sentence: The resource extraction of minerals in the Amazon has raised concerns about deforestation and loss of biodiversity.
Animal Communication – The transfer of information from one animal to another, which can be through vocalizations, body language, or chemical signals. – Example sentence: Animal communication in dolphins involves complex vocalizations that researchers are still working to fully understand.
Biodiversity – The variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem, often used as a measure of the health of biological systems. – Example sentence: Protecting biodiversity is essential for maintaining ecosystem services that humans rely on, such as pollination and water purification.
