Bernie Krause (*1938) is a man of many talents. He has been working as musician, recording engineer and sound designer with a lot of prominent directors and producers and he was in-volved in films like Rosemary’s Baby and Apocalypse Now. By now, he has published a total of 54 CDs, among them the Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (with Paul Beaver) in 1967, aninstructional recording on how the then-new Moog synthesizer could be used.Since 1979, Krause has been concentrating on recording of wild natural soundscapes fromaround the world. His specialization in this field led to a PhD in Creative Arts with Internshipin Bioacoustics, that he achieved at the Union Institute and University Cincinnati.Besides a number of papers that analyse the impact of ecological destruction and climate changewith means of bioacoustic research, his most important (and succesful) publication is The GreatAnimal Orchestra. Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places of 2012. In this book,Krause tries to prove that in the early stages of mankind music originates in mimicking theacoustical environment. Methodiologically, he differentiates the soundscape (a term adopted from R. Murray Schafer, meaning the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in con-text) into geophony—nonbiological natural sounds, first sounds on earth—, biophony—sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources— and anthrophony—human-generated sound. According to Krause, anthrophony in general, music in particular originates in imitating both geophony and biophony. As instances he adduces the Sami yoik that imitatesthe constant wind that roars across the open plains and tundra, and the music of the Ba’akaculture in Central Africa, where he sees the complex polyphony as directly derived from thegeophony and biophony of the tropical rainforest.
Krause’s methodology is questionable and his proofs are hardly convincing, given that the ex-traordinary Ba’aka culture—which without doubt attracts attention—might not be representa-tive for the mankind as a whole. However, Krause’s theory raises some important questionslike:
Where is the transition between biophony and anthrophony?
Where is the transition betweenimitated sounds and music?
Is it music at all that Krause is writing about?