In 1985 electronic music pioneer Bernie Krause was asked to step in to help save a stranded humpback whale. Krause was known back then for being an evangelist of Moog synthesizers, not a whale whisperer. But from that moment he would go on to become a foundational scientist in the new field of ecoacoustics, or soundscape ecology.

In this episode producer Patrick McNameeKing talks to three scientists from the growing field of ecoacoustics. From saving Humphrey the humpback whale, to eavesdropping on frogs, they share what ecoacoustics tells us about the biodiversity of our world, and why they still have hope.

Featuring Bernie Krause, Brian Pijanowski, and Ximena Bernal.

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CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Patrick McNameeKing

Mixed by Patrick McNameeKing, Taylor Quimby, and Felix Poon

Editing by Taylor Quimby, with help from Marina Henke and Felix Poon

Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, and Jessica Hunt.

Taylor Quimby is Director of Podcasts.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, El Flaco Collective, and Heath Cantu

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In - a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

[MUX IN: Deactivated by Matt large]

Picture this. It’s the fall of 1985. Roger Waters is leaving Pink FLoyd, LL Cool J is blowing up on underground radio stations, and Back To The Future is number one at the box office.

Back to the Future: ...are you telling me you built a time machine out of a delorean??...]

Then, on October 10: a hump back whale, 40 feet long, weighing as much as 4 or 5 school buses, swims up the Sacramento River in California and refuses to turn around.

News Reporter: Experts were baffled. Normally, humpback whales never get lost.

Person: This is extremely unusual, I’ve never heard of a humpback coming back this far.

[MUX OUT]

He’s stuck there for weeks. He earns a place in people’s hearts, and also a name.

Kids singing: Humphrey, you’re our friend

Humphrey the Humpback.

Kids singing: Now the story has to end.

[MUX IN: Astrisx by Blue Dot Sessions]

But, humpbacks are not meant to be in shallow water.

People try all sorts of things to get him back to the ocean. They drag a net hoping to herd him, they try to lure him with meat. Nothing is working.

Bernie Krause: So I was called by the Marine Mammal Center to see if I knew anybody who could help get the animal out.

Bernie Krause was an experimental musician in the 60s and 70s. He took Pete Seger’s spot in the folk band The Weavers, and was an early evangelist of the Moog synthesizer.

[MUX OUT / MOOG IN AND OUT]

Bernie had an idea: Could sound help lure Humphrey out of the river?

One thing they tried was banging pipes together underwater to drive Humphrey back towards the ocean.

Bernie Krause: at one point we got the animal up the river seventy miles almost, toward the bay.

But, they still had a ways to go. Another researcher sent Bernie a tape recording of humpback whale feeding sounds.

55 seconds of sound, very bad quality.

And full of boat engine noise. But Bernie had a secret weapon. A special type of sound filter called an

adaptive predictive deconvolution filter.

Something that was used by the FBI and FAA to filter noise and listen to black box recordings after plane crashes.

Bernie used it to clean up the whale tape. And then

what I did was, I made a 20-minute tape of this thing, changing the pitch and the time and the, uh, all of the different parameters of sound.

all I know is that we stuck it in the water … And that animal was a quarter of a mile away.

[MUX IN: Cases to Rest by Blue Dot Sessions]

Well it came so fast that it actually almost capsized the boat and scared the shit out of us. But it didn't, and it righted itself, and we put it in gear and the animal just followed us up the river.

After three weeks of attempts to draw him out, Humphrey followed Bernie and his team back to the ocean in less than a day.

News Reporter: He was heading to life among his own kind. But he left thousands of friends behind.

Person1: He put us on the map.

Person2: Yeah, if anything probably you saw history made here. It may never happen again.

Today on Outside/In, we are exploring the power of sound in nature. Producer Patrick McNameeKing is going to introduce us to three scientists from the growing field of ecoacoustics… each of them trying to open their ears, hearts, and microphones… to document and understand the world through noise.

Stick around.

[MUX OUT]

FIRST HALF

Patrick McNameeKing: From NHPR, this is Outside/In, I’m Patrick McNameeKing.

When I was in high school, I became obsessed with American avant-garde music.

[Fade in John Cage: Prepared Piano and Orchestra Second Part ~4:50]

Minimalism, experimental, harsh noise, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros. I wanted to hear as much of it as I could.

One day, I heard this..

[Needle drop + vinyl crackle, Fade in Krause + Beaver: Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music]

This may not sound pioneering to your ears now – but at the time, electronic instruments were strange, new frontier in music.

And this recording came from The 1968 Nonesuch Records Guide to Electronic Music, it was by Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver.

Yes, Bernie Krause, who later would go on to help rescue Humphrey the Humpback.

Bernie Krause: My name is Bernie Krause, I’m a bio acoustician which means I record animals for a living.

Bernie is the first of three scientists I want you to meet in this episode.

And Bernie, even though he's a quiet and humble guy – now in his ‘80s – was once a pretty big deal.

Bernie Krause: Well I came to this work, uh, mostly through music. I was a synthesizer player, a guitar player. I played all stringed instruments.

He worked in music studios, and with his business and creative partner, Paul Beaver, was an early pioneer of the Moog synthesizer.

Moogs are those electronic keyboards that have lots of little nobs and switches. But back in the day, the early ones were the size of filing cabinets.

They made the wild bloopy noises I heard as a high-schooler, long before MIDI and auto-tune became the norm.

Bernie and his Moog were in demand in the late 60s. He recorded with bands like the Monkeys and the Beach Boys, and he made Jim Morrison's voice sound trippy on the album "Strange Days."

[MUX IN: "Strange days, have found us... DOWN MUSIC]

Business was good, but something was missing.

Bernie Krause: I didn’t want to work in studios anymore, I wanted to be closer to the natural world, and so tried to find a way to, um, work outside.

So…

Bernie Krause: We immediately made the switch away from technology into natural sound.

In 1968, Krause and Beaver recorded "In a Wild Sanctuary.." It’s woven with track names like: "Salute to the Vanishing Bald Eagle," and "So Long As The Waters Flow.” And okay, so it definitely had some electronic instruments… and some pretty gnarly synth riffs…But also, field recordings of the natural world.

[MUX IN: Walking Green Algae Blues]

It was the first album on ecology and the first album ever to use natural sound as a component of orchestration.

But Getting those field recordings turned out to be a challenge. For someone who came of age during the hippie movement, and psychedelics – Bernie was kind of an indoor guy.

Bernie Krause: I was terrified of the natural world and I was scared of animals. I grew up in a family which never had one and, uh, you know, and thought they were dirty and, if not dangerous. So that’s what I had to deal with.

He dealt with it.

The upshot was that, In a Wild Sanctuary came out and it got me outside to begin to record, natural soundscapes. And, uh, from , the moment that I turned on that recorder I decided right then and there that was what I wanted to do the rest of my life.

[MUX FADES]

Bernie continued to work in music and film for a few more years. He even used his moog to make the helicopter sounds for the infamous beach invasion scene in Apocalypse Now

[IN: Apocalypse Now Clip ~12:08 "Do you want to surf soldier?" "yes sir," "that's good, cause you either surf, or you fight."]

But after that… he took the leap.

Bernie Krause: After working on Apocalypse Now, I went back to school, got my PhD in bioacoustics, and I've never looked back.

[MUX IN: Are We Loose Yet by Blue Dot Sessions]

Bioacoustics.

It’s what you get when you take the science of living things, and blend it with a love of recordings and sound. Bioacousticians are trying to understand how organisms make sound… how they put it out into the world… and how the world, and everything in it, receives that sound.

It’s a relatively new field. In the 1920s, a Slovenian biologist named Ivan Regen recorded crickets, and played the sound back to other crickets to see what would happen.

And by the time Bernie got bit by the bioacoustics bug, scientists were pretty much still recording just one animal at a time, trying to sort of isolate their sonic signatures.

A dolphins clicking.

[SFX]

The call of a [pick a songbird].

[SFX]

But Bernie, heard something else entirely… something that would alter the field forever.

Well, I heard the sound of the natural world differently. I didn't hear it bird by bird. I heard it, as a collection of sound, as an orchestration, and, as I continued recording, I wanted to hear the sound of a whole habitat.

[vibrant ecosystem recording swells up throughout this bite]

He started using microphones that let in sound from all directions

And then I wondered why it was that birds sang the way that they did.

Bioacousticians use a tool called a spectrogram that translates sound into a picture. Looking at the picture, you can tell how much of each frequency is playing at any given time.

[MUX OUT]

And when Bernie looked at these, he saw something that surprised him.

So I want you to listen to this recording of a dawn chorus in the jungles of Borneo.

[Dawn Chorus]

I noticed that the birds sang one area of narrow bandwidth,

[Recording of dawn chorus, BP filter on birds]

insects in another,

[open BP on insects]

mammals in another,

(that’s a gibbon by the way)

Calls from different animals were dividing up the spectrum of sound. They each occupied different frequencies. And most importantly, the frequencies didn't overlap very much. It was like they were making room for one another.

He immediately made the connection to music.

They all formed these kinds of niches like instruments in an orchestra. Trumpets on one line,

[MUX IN: Le Loft by El Flaco Collective]

strings on another, and so on.

And it struck me that maybe we got to music by learning, the structure of sound like animals have conveyed to us

Just like a good piece of music spreads the instruments across low and high pitched sounds, to keep from being all cluttered,

Animals appeared to find empty frequencies in the soundscape, to make sure they were being heard.

So Bernie came up with a hypothesis:

Bernie Krause: The acoustic niche hypothesis, which postulates that in a healthy habitat, all the animals find bandwidth within which to vocalize to stay out of each other's way.

So beyond the poetic analogy of an orchestra of animals, this behavior makes a lot of practical sense.

If you are a bird, calling to attract a mate, each call costs energy. The most efficient use of that energy is to make your calls using a frequency that nobody else is using.

The acoustic niche hypothesis has become a modern framework through which many scientists use sound to study ecosystems.

The Hypothesis puts forward the idea that in a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem, the audio spectrum will be filled out: No instruments are missing from the orchestra.

[MUX OUT / IN Colorado audio -- full chorus]

The flip side of this hypothesis is that an unhealthy ecosystem might sound a little less filled out.

Bernie shows me that through recording the same location year after year during a drought in Northern California, he was able to use sound to measure the decline and collapse of the region's biodiversity.

It went from really beautiful texture and density and diversity of birds

[In - Silent spring tape]

To nothing. There was no sound, and it was the first silent spring I'd ever heard.

[MUX IN: The Bus at Dawn by Blue Dot Sessions]

It's heartbreaking. And, uh, it's something that I have to live with every day because that's my work.

[MUX]

Patrick McNameeKing: How do you carry on doing this? What motivates you?

Bernie Krause: Well, I just want people to hear what I've heard, to understand what I've come across, and to get a sense of the beauty and the wonder of the natural world. Unless people understand how important that is, I'm not terribly optimistic about the outcome

[Fade out silent spring // MUX OUT]

BREAK

This is Outside/In, from NHPR. I’m Patrick McNameeKing.

Synth evangelist turned scientist Bernie Krause brought the big picture view to the field of bioacoustics… by not just listening to the sounds of distinct animals… but whole ecosystems.

Which brings us to our next scientist… a man who is on a quest to record as much of the natural world as he can…, even though he knows he might never hear it all.

Brian Pijanowski: I wanted to come up with a universal variable. What could I measure everywhere, and it could tell me about not only just the birds, but the environment in general, humans and maybe even the atmosphere.

[MUX IN: Cases to Rest by Blue Dot Sessions]

Doctor Brian Pijanowski teaches at Purdue University, and he is also the director of the Center for Global Soundscapes.

And then sound just kinda went, boom, here I am.

Like Bernie, Brian is a musician. The specific field he works in is called Soundscape Ecology… a field that looks at sound almost like an ecosystem… where the sounds of animals, the earth, and the built environment are all interacting with one another.

Brian is recording sound all over the planet, pretty much all of the time. He uses these devices called Passive Acoustic Monitors, or as he calls them:

Brian Pijanowski: My magic green boxes. They, about the size of, of, uh, a regular textbook or something, And two microphones on either end, so it's recording, recording in stereo. When you listen to it, it sounds like you're just there, it’s really cool.

These "magic green boxes" run on just a few batteries, and can record for up to a month or more.

Sometimes, they’re placed in plastic cases to protect them from the elements – or, you can spring for the magic BLUE version if you want to put one underwater.

Brian Pijanowski: It’s amazing kind of technology. We record a place and develop this long history of what it sounds like.

These recorders are deployed in ecosystems all over the world, collecting literally millions of hours of audio. This brings up a unique challenge: How can all of those hours of sound be useful, if scientists don’t have enough time to even listen to them all?

[MUX FADE UNDER AND OUT]

To make sense of the recordings, Dr. Pijanowski uses something called the Acoustic Complexity Index, or ACI.

Can you walk me through the acoustic complexity index? Is it, is it a walk-through k- kind of thing? No, it's not. Okay.

Fair enough. But it is important. Here's a way to think about it:

[IN: factory or machine hum - Pan center/left]

Imagine setting up one of Dr. Pijanowski's green boxes next to a factory. There's a steady hum from the machinery,

[SFX: sparrow call pan R]

Maybe there’s a sparrow nearby, but most of the soundscape is just . That machine hum; continuous, repetitive, and predictable. Low complexity.

[Out factory sound, in dawn chorus]

Compare that to a recording where – sure there’s some street noise – but also, insects, birds, frogs…high complexity.

The Acoustic Complexity Index uses computer processing to measure changes in pitch and volume over time, and gives it a score. The more varied and layered the sounds are, the higher the score.

And so, the measure of complexity then is a measure of maybe the amount of information that's being carried in that acoustic signal. That's the, the, the core essence of that idea.

High complexity correlates to high biodiversity. This is a really big deal, because it means scientists can use sound to observe an ecosystem… and measure its health… without ever having to step inside it. They can also keep track of how low-complexity sounds like road noise and factory hum change biodiverse environments.

The sound becomes a set of data over time, like tracking rainfall or temperature.

Patrick McNameeKing: Are there recordings that you have of soundscapes that now are extinct or, will not exist in, in a specific space that you've, you've studied?

Brian Pijanowski: I'm almost certain there are. Yeah. Yeah, but I call those recordings acoustic fossils because they represent what was there at one point in time.

[MUX IN: Yesterday’s Thoughts by Heath Cantu]

What was there? I oftentimes wonder to what extent is the recording of a call or an animal that I have in my library, how many do I have where there-- this is the only evidence that humans have of a species

There's a beat to every natural ecosystem. How does it vary from place to place, from places that are natural, undisturbed, to places that are disturbed? What are the melodies that exist and how do they differ?

Brian is as much an explorer as he is a scientist. He even went to Mongolia, to learn from Indigenous herders. He wanted to know:

"What do you listen to? Why do you listen?"

He asked a herder where he could record the best nature sounds. The herder told him:

“ My energy-giving site. It's a place I go when I'm stressed, when I'm feeling down, when things aren't going right."

The herder said that being in this energy-giving site, and listening to nature provided a very specific feeling

It's the feeling you get when you ride a horse into the wind. It just takes everything away from you. It just refeshes your entire body. It replenishes every cell in your body.

[MUX swell and out here]

Brian wants to share nature through engineering. He wants to get urban planners to turn the low-complexity of say, traffic, into something refreshing… something that makes you feel the way you do when you’re riding a horse into the wind.

It's gonna be good for us, and most importantly, it's gonna be good for nature because we're gonna reconnect with it.

Patrick McNameeKing: You're speaking of this in the future tense. Can I infer that you are hopeful?

Brian Pijanowski: Yeah, absolutely. I see initiatives kind of starting. So yes, planners, engineers, people that are interested in environmental psychology working together with communities, yeah, I think we have, we have a chance.

[MUX IN AND OUT - Cases to Rest by Blue Dot Sessions]

We started this episode zooming out, from the sounds of a single species, to the sonic landscape of an entire ecosystem. But what happens when we zoom all the way back in?

What CAN we learn by listening to individual species?

And… by thinking about who ELSE is listening to those animals?

[00:15:31-00:15:35] Patrick McNameeKing: so I gather frogs are kind of like the center of your your research, right?

[00:15:37-00:15:41] Ximena Bernal: Yes. Okay. What do you know about frogs? Tell me, what do you what do you imagine when you think about frogs.

[00:15:42-00:15:48] Patrick McNameeKing: So I live in New Hampshire. We have lots of frogs. We have lots of toads. My favorite.

[00:15:48-00:15:51] Ximena Bernal: Okay. So do you know what the difference between a frog and a toad?

[00:15:53-00:15:54] Patrick McNameeKing: No.

[MUX IN: Lo Margin by Blue Dot Sessions]

Dr. Ximena Bernal loves frogs. And she knows a LOT about them. Including this basic fact I feel like I should have learned a long time ago: toads – which have dry, thick skin, and a few other characteristics – are a subset of frogs. Not something different.

[00:16:18-00:16:21] Ximena Bernal: all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

Ximena first got acquainted with frogs As a kid growing up in Colombia.

Back then, she had a cousin who was bigger, and stronger than her.

[00:14:20-00:14:23] Ximena Bernal: And she was a bully. [laughs]

But Ximena had a secret weapon.

it turns out that her weakness, her kryptonite, were frogs.

Her cousin was scared of frogs - so Ximena would catch them, and keep one in her pocket. And if her cousin tried to bully her, she would pull it out and say:

"I have a frog," it would be like an invisible shield.

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

Today, she keeps frogs as pets, but she also studies them...for science. She's a professor at Purdue University – colleagues with Brian.

Unlike Brian’s work that focuses on a planetary scale, Ximena studies animal communication.

Patrick McNameeKing: I'm, I'm curious, so, every time I walk down to the swamp to listen to the spring peepers, they all go quiet. Like, how are you getting in the weeds and, like, exploring this?

Ximena Bernal: This is part of what I love about this, because sometimes being a researcher is like being a detective. we record frogs, but you have to be really quiet and, approach them. it has that component, but also the component of the detective work with the knowledge, putting all the pieces together.

Frogs, as you know, are great at signaling to each other with sound.

There are bullfrogs… [SFX]

Peepers… [SFX]

Wood frogs....[SFX]

And often, those sounds are how male frogs find and attract females.

But, in addition to mating calls,Ximena research is focused on which other animals might be listening in.

It’s a phenomenon called… no surprise here… “eavesdropping.”

Which is a problem for frogs because they are, as she put is:

[00:58:40-00:58:46] Ximena Bernal: the chicken nuggets of the forest. Everybody likes them. Everybody eats them.

so frogs are in a constant battle – trying to call out to their own species… and avoid being heard by parasites and predators.

so that's where the, they have to deal with this trade-off, and I find it very interesting to see how animals are navigating from both sides, from the eavesdropper side and from the signaler side, they're navigating these challenges and the diverse array of strategies that have resulted from this

So for example…

[00:21:34-00:22:27] Ximena Bernal: we work on these pieces, for instance, that is called Tungara frog. And males produce a call that sounds like their name.

[Tungara sounds]

And if you have a male that is calling by himself, he will mostly produce the first part.

[MUX IN: Pglet Credits]

So researchers started wondering… why the two calls? Do females prefer one over the other.

And what they found is that females prefer the calls that sound like tungara. Not just tongue. And they're like, if females find them more attractive, why wouldn't they produce it? Always? Why wouldn't you always start your sexier side?

The reason is because bats also prefer the full Tungura call…

So when the frogs are isolated, they do the abbreviated version – less likely to attract a mate. But also less likely to wind up as a chicken nugget.

[MUX OUT]

I think my favorite example of eavesdropping comes, not from frogs, but from crickets.

Ximena told me about a type of cricket called The Pacific Field Cricket, that years ago got introduced to Hawaii through shipping boats. It had a classic cricket signal that males use to attract mates.

But later, a parasitic fly was introduced - an eavesdropper that was ALSO listening for the cricket’s chirp.

[00:25:16-00:25:40] Ximena Bernal: So the male crickets are calling, and these flies come to them, and then they lay their offspring and and the offspring is raised like the larvae eat the cricket from the inside out.

Ximena says it’s like something out of a horror movie…

that alien movie that like they're coming out of it, but out of the cricket and they killed them in the process.

SO the noisy crickets start dying left and right, preyed upon by the parasitic flies.

Except for a select few – crickets that had a single mutation, that made it impossible for them to make their iconic chirping sound.

[00:25:40-00:25:46] Ximena Bernal: So this is a very strong selective pressure. And the crickets in Hawaii became silent.

[MUX IN: Are We Loose Yet by Blue Dot Sessions]

[00:28:52-00:29:20] Ximena Bernal: So we know that evolution is a slow process, takes a lot of time, but we also are learning. It's been a few decades in which we're being aware that evolution sometimes can happen really fast, and this is one of those cases. So in this example, the neat part is that we were able to see evolution in action and even pinpoint it to the genetics single mutation.

And to learn all of these things… all we had to do… was listen in.

Bernie, Brian, and Ximena spoke in some pretty technical terms about what they study. It makes sense: they’re scientists. But they all shared an enthusiasm that sounded to me a lot like artists describing their craft. I wondered how they are able to keep a foot in the abstract and a foot in the world of contagious inspiration. Brian has thought about this a lot:

Brian Pijanowski: You know, we kinda stumble into the scientific community by describing things

Maybe it’s just that there’s something universal about the sounds of the natural world. Sound is a magnet. You feel its pull even when talking about heady technical things like spectrographs, acoustic complexity, and biodiversity.

Brian Pijanowski: …but if I just say, "Hey, sit down and listen to the dawn chorus of Borneo," now you know what I mean.

[MUX OUT / IN: Dawn Chorus]

That is it for today’s episode. It was reported, produced and mixed by Patrick McNameeKing with help from Taylor Quimby and Felix Poon.

Patrick, by the way, loves playing around with synths in his freetime. He actually hosts occasional film screenings where he’ll perform a live ambient music sound track. It’s pretty trippy.

The episode was edited by Taylor Quimby, with help from Marina Henke and Felix Poon. Our team also includes Justine Paradis and me, Nate Hegyi.

One of my favorite live soundtracks is from the 1995 film ‘Dead Man.’

Neil Young recorded the entire thing in real time while watching the movie. He did it in three takes. It’s got some rippin’ guitar solos.

Taylor Quimby is NHPR’s director of podcasts.

Shout out to Carol Carlson who is a member of our Patreon. You can join Carol and get add-free episodes for as little as $5 bucks a month. Head on over to patreon.com/outsideinradio.

Music in this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, El Flaco Collective, and Heath Cantu.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

## Broadcast##

This episode was reported and mixed by Patrick McNameeKing, with help from TQ and FP.

Editing by Taylor Quimby, with help from Marina Henke and Felix Poon. Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Jessica Hunt, and me, your host, Nate Hegyi.

Taylor Quimby is Director of Podcasts

Music in this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, El Flaco Collective, Amber Glow, and Heath Cantu.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.