Quotes from Bernie Krause

Our problem is that sound is not important in our culture. We know the world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding.

With my portable recording system, I didn't feel like I was listening as a distant observer; rather, I had been sucked into a new space - becoming an integral part of the experience itself.

the comparative framework of sounds or tones that make up a musical scale. So while frequency is a physical property of sound—it's a measurement of the number of cycles per second of a sound wave—pitch refers to what we hear. The chromatic scale

when you're in a rain forest, where the density and diversity of wildlife are the greatest, you will always hear critters entering the soundscape each day in a structured order, almost as if following Darwin's timeline of evolution: insects first, then amphibians, then reptiles, then birds, then mammals." [from an interview in Sun Magazine © 2014]

Many of us don't distinguish between the acts of listening and hearing. It's

earthquake P-waves had reportedly been made with microphones

Timbre is the emblematic tone, or voice, generated by each type of instrument or biological sound source. Not only do musical instruments have singular voice characteristics but so does every living organism and most man-made machines. The difference between the sound of a violin and that of a trumpet is as distinctive as that between a cicada and an American robin, or a cat and a dog—or between a Rolls-Royce and a Formula 1 automobile. When Paul Beaver and I first began

sound," in a different way. Most instruments produce tones that are quite complex, each generating a series of overtones that contribute to our perception of their timbre and that exist in each note played on the instrument, defining its unique, haunting sound. A clarinet, for instance, produces a series of overtones in which some of

Humans with perfect reception can hear frequencies between 20 wave cycles per second, or 20 Hz, at the low end to 20,000 Hz at the high end. The lowest note on a typical piano is 27.5 Hz, and the highest is about 4,186 Hz. Nonhuman animals have evolved different ranges of hearing, the widest

Pitch is closely related to frequency, but the two are not the same thing. Pitch is mostly used in the comparative framework of sounds or tones that make up a musical scale. So while frequency is a physical property of sound—it's a measurement of the number of cycles

oldest folk-music tradition in Europe. Yoik is shaped, in part, to convey a sense of place through the composition of its sounds. Along with the Sami, Tuvan throat singers from Central Asia and some Inuit groups who

A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.