When musician and audio designer Bernie Krause began capturing soundscapes of earthbound and marine life more than 50 years ago, he could hardly imagine that the collection would eventually burst with more than 5,000 hours of recordings — or that within his lifetime, more than half of that recorded biodiversity would be lost.
This insight frames the wondrous and yet sobering scenario at the heart of “The Great Animal Orchestra,” a soundscape exhibition premiering on the West Coast on June 10 and running to Oct. 15 thanks to The Fondation Cartier and San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
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A collaboration between Krause, who resides in Sonoma County, and the London-based United Visual Artists, the exhibit will be an immersive installation featuring seven soundscapes timed with spectrograms, or visual representations of the audio. Listeners will be encouraged to preserve and protect the “orchestras” of the living, natural world.
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The project debuted in Salem, Massachusetts, at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2021, but now comes to Krause’s Bay Area home region at the Exploratorium science and technology experience center in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Pier 15.
As a musician and audio designer, Krause previously worked with artists like The Doors and Van Morrison, and his work innovating the synth pop sound would end up dominating the music and movie industries, showing up in more than 250 albums and 135 feature films. So for his second act as a soundscape ecologist, he brought a musician’s ear to animal vocalizations. He started out in the ’70s with audio captures across North America, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as from the world’s oceans.
“This exhibition has been in the making for more than 50 years, when Bernie first met Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer while recording soundscapes in San Francisco,” says Lindsay Bierman, executive director of the Exploratorium. “Bernie recognized that these recordings were capturing a unique, non-human perspective that could not be experienced in any other way, and they were accessible to anyone willing to take the time to listen.”
In 2016, the Fondation Cartier commissioned The Great Animal Orchestra for the exhibit. Hervé Chandès, the foundation’s artistic general director, conceived of an immersive audiovisual experience around Krause’s recordings, so the organization introduced him to the UVA. Krause compiled the audio clips into habitats and the London-based group used computer software to translate them into visuals. At the Exploratorium, visitors will experience the exhibit in a soundproof, stand-alone gallery with LEDs.
“Bernie Krause’s work teaches us that each animal species possesses its own acoustic animal signature that, like a musical instrument in an orchestra, positions itself with both precision and subtlety within the score of the soundscape of the ecosystem in which it lives,” Chandès says.
“The polyphony of the great animal orchestra is rapidly being lost, and we must band together to protect these indispensable resources and environments.”
The Great Animal Orchestra is now part of the Fondation Cartier’s permanent collection.
The organization also produced French filmmaker Vincent Tricon’s documentary, “Bernie Krause: A Life With the Great Animal Orchestra.” The film, which won Best Documentary at the Los Angeles CineFest in January, premiered during the Peabody Essex Museum exhibit in 2021 and will be screened at the Exploratorium as well.