IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2022 - 22

Artist Dr. Bernie Krause's Great Animal
Orchestra, an exhibit conceived by the
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
based on Krause's years of work recording
in the field and his 2012 book of
the same name.
Over the course of 92 min, guests are
transported to seven different habitats, a
combination of tropical, subtropical, subarctic,
temperate, and marine. One is the
Dzanga-Sangha, a protected area in the
Central African Republic, where guests
listen as a herd of forest elephants
in a forest marsh bath, ingest
salt, wander, and socialize.
In this rainforest,
visitors also hear
the vocalizations,
stridulations, and
movements of an
entire orchestra
including the African
gray parrot,
Hadada ibis, Hartlaub's
duck, a Guinea
turaco, the red-chested
cuckoo, southern tree hyrax,
western lowland gorilla, greater
spot-nosed monkey, and nocturnal orthoptera,
alongside sounds of the flora
and fauna, wind, and running water.
" The underlying conceptual thread
is based on reversing long-held production
paradigms where the visual aspects
of a performance have historically led
the audio component, " says Krause. " In
this piece, sound plays the lead role, and
the visual is given a supporting position. "
Krause does not mean to suggest that the
visual is less important, but instead to " reinstate
sound as a dominant sense. " The
exhibit gives visitors the chance to reconnect
with sound, and perhaps to contemplate
the degree to which animals rely on
their aural habitat.
The soundscapes are transmitted in
Dolby Surround 7.1, which Krause says
proved in testing as the " best acoustically
spatial illusion we could achieve from
any spot in the theater. " What visitors see
moving from left to right across the three
22
sides of the theater are spectrograms,
graphic illustrations of the soundscapes,
created by Matt Clark and his team at
United Visual Artists (UVA) in London.
UVA performs large-format, real-time visual
rendering by taking the audio signal
and synchronously transforming the data
into streaming imagery, with time represented
on the x-axis and frequency on
the y-axis.
The
exhibit gives
visitors the chance
to reconnect with
rely on their aural
habitat.
sound, and perhaps to
contemplate the degree
to which animals
This image, displayed against the
black background, " seamlessly surrounds
the visitors on three sides, " beginning
on the left and moving
across the three walls
before disappearing,
while the animals are
identified in text on
the screen. Watching
the spectrograms,
visitors may
notice what Krause
has theorized since
the 1980s: all soundproducing
organisms
in a given healthy habitat
develop their own bandwidth
within which to vocalize so that
their voices are not masked by other signals,
and as a way to ensure their survival
by expending as little energy as possible
communicating. This results in a naturally
structured symphony of sound called
the biophony.
Soundscape Ecologist and Sound
Artist Krause. (Source: Chris Chung.)
To Krause, the Dzanga-Sangha piece
may be the most powerful feature of the
program. The elephant exchanges, he explains,
represent a " vocal variety and dynamic
rarely heard by these critters all at
once, " making this recording rare. Still,
Krause has spent decades traveling the
world, over which he has amassed more
than 5,000 h of recordings encompassing
more than 1,100 habitats and more than
15,000 identified organisms, and for every
one of his recordings, Krause can point
out something unique and memorable.
Krause sets up for a day of recording. (Source: Masha Karpoukhina.)
IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2022
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2022

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