The Great Animal Orchestra

Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

Contributors

By Bernie Krause

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$8.99

Price

$10.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 19, 2012. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A “passionate amalgam of science and autobiography” that will leave you hearing — and seeing — nature as never before (New York Times Book Review). 

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world’s leading experts in natural sound, and he’s spent his life discovering and recording nature’s rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world’s honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren’t vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged.

From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales — whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours — to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa’s Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet’s deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm.

The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man’s pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

Genre:

On Sale
Mar 19, 2012
Page Count
288 pages
ISBN-13
9780316192392

Introduction

Early Soundscape

Chapter One

Jaguar
Muir Woods
Ocean
Baboons
Wolves
Elk

Chapter Two

Big Sur
North Sea
Praia
Fresh Water Lake
Rain & Thunder
Rain & Thunder Transition
Snow in Tetons
Glacier Mass
Wind

Chapter Three

Mountain Gorillas
Ants
Baby Vultures
Anemone
Insect Larvae
Hippos
Cricket
LiMe88before
LiMe88after
Reef (alive)
Reef (dead)
Echo-y Rainforest
Dry Desert
Open Tundra
SpreadCrk09
SpreadCrk81

Chapter Four

Kenya Government Camp
Crocs Around a Boat
Gibbons
Elephants
Borneo Dawn

Chapter Five

Mountain Gorillas Singing
Mountain Gorilla Scream
Orca Humpback Attack
Wild Orcas
Orcas in Captivity
Beaver Cries
Hadrosaurus
Potoo
Musician Wren
Esime
Dzanga-Sanga bai
Women Gathering Payu

Chapter Six

Ives
Nightingale
Once on a Windy Nite (excerpt)

Chapter Seven

Yellowstone in Fall

Chapter Eight

Spadefoot 1
Spadefoot 2
Amazon Chorus (normal)
Amazon Chorus
Snowmo Cluster

Chapter Nine (Coda)

Atlantic Rainforest
Legend Days Are Over 
Chernobyl Dawn
Desert Solitudes
Arctic Timber Lake
Candle Ice