The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places

This memoir of sonic investigation highlights the lessons learned from 40 years of listening to the world’s biophonies—the sounds of living organisms. Musician and naturalist Krause (Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World) uses the language of music to understand everything from birdsong, to ocean waves, to decimated habitats, relying perhaps too heavily on the experiences of Native peoples to answer his questions about the origins of music, especially how the sonic structure inherent in biophany impacted human expression to take the form of music. While Krause notes competing theories on music’s evolution and makes a clear case for nature’s ongoing influence on contemporary composition, the origins of music are never found. Instead, Krause’s musical expertise allows him to hear the orchestral layering of different species in each biophony, an insight that explains group vocalization as an evolutionary survival mechanism rather than a purposeful chorus of noise. As Krause discovered early in his career, his body of work unintentionally revealed “the state of biomes that have rendered ecologically transformed through human intervention.” Photos. (Mar.)