Melodies of the Tetons
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009, by Eric Ebeling
What do the Tetons sound like?
An innovative group of scientists, artists, audio engineers, educators, naturalists and musicians sought to answer that question last week at a “Sounds of Nature Workshop” in Grand Teton National Park and record their discoveries for posterity.
And not a moment too soon.
According to Bernie Krause, a leading pioneer of “biophony” - the study and scientific collection of the sounds of natural environments - almost 50% of the biological soundscapes he has collected over 40 years are from now-extinct habitats.
“Bio-acoustician” Krause, founder of the Wildlife Sanctuary in Glen Ellen, California, explained that earth’s wild habitats possess unique “sound signatures” - a rich diversity of audio information from the vocalizations, behavior, mating rituals, predations, foragings, migrations, and surrounding environments of air and terrestrial wildlife - that are quickly being lost to construction, development, climate change, deforestation, and human impacts of all kinds.
Workshop sound expert Martyn Stewart claimed the challenge of recording habitats free of human noise pollution was becoming “frightening.” When be began 30 years ago, “it took three to four hours to record one ‘pristine’ hour. It now takes 2000 hours.”
Carefully recorded and catalogued sound libraries are proving to be an important resource for wildlife biology studies, according to Krause, providing a better understanding of discrete environments’ unique characteristics — including their age, creature density, and habitat health.
But Krause is also an ardent evangelist about the aesthetic experience of “nature’s music” and the value for the human animal of really listening to nature.
“Often,” insisted Krause, “it is through the sounds of the natural world that we are most immediately connected to it. It is deeply enriching way of observing, experiencing and understanding it.”
Workshop attendee Tom Rusert echoed that claim relative to his first visit to Jackson Hole. Having traveled the world as a birding enthusiast and educator, he described his experience listening to the Tetons as “a communion with a very special place. It has an incredible natural heartbeat.”
Each day, he and other workshop participants left their cabins at the GTNP’s conservation landmark Murie Center, workshop host, armed not with cameras but individual hand-held digital microphones.
They were in search of the Tetons’ signature audio vitals - the whoosh of a diving great-horned owl, the thump and rumble of buffalo on the valley floor, the aquatic gurgles of a moose cow striding through a marsh, her calf munching on newly-sprouting foliage.
What they captured were the voices and songs of the Tetons’ unique “creature chorus.” What they discovered, according to workshop sound chaperon Kevin Colver, was that “while a picture is worth a thousand words, one sound can create a thousand pictures.”
Click the following link to listen to an excerpt of a recording from the workshop tetondawn.
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