Bernie Krause

Bernard L. Krause (born December 8, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American musician, soundscape recordist and bio-acoustician, who coined the term biophony[1] and helped define the structure of soundscape ecology[2]. Krause holds a Ph.D. in bioacoustics from Union Institute & University in Cincinnati.

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Biography

Bernie Krause was born in 1938. Somewhat of a musical prodigy, by age 3-1/2 he studied violin and by age 4 classical composition. He performed on a variety of stringed instruments (cello, bass, viola, harp) but fell in love with the guitar. He was disappointed when in 1955 not a single music school to which he applied would accept him with guitar as his primary instrument. Krause went on to work as a studio guitarist on jazz sessions and, occasionally, on early Motown sessions. He also worked as a recording engineer and producer in Ann Arbor while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He joined The Weavers in 1963 and stayed with them until they disbanded a year later[3].

Electronic Musician

After the breakup of The Weavers, Krause moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to study electronic music at Mills College, a time when avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pauline Oliveros lectured and performed there. It was coincidentally also the beginnings of the synthesizer, with Don Buchla and Robert Moog experimenting with putting electronic circuits together into all-purpose modular musical instruments. During this time Krause met Paul Beaver and formed Beaver & Krause. They played Moog synthesizer on the Monkees recording, "Star Collector" (1967), one of the first pop recordings to feature synthesizer. In 1968 they released The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music which was part-instructional and part a demonstration of the capabilities of this new instrument. They went on to perform on hundreds of sessions for some of the biggest names in music, including The Byrds, The Doors, Stevie Wonder and George Harrison. In November 1968, Krause demonstrated the Moog for Harrison, who was visiting California; a recording of Krause's concept and performance became the basis of "No Time Or Space", a track featured on Harrison's Electronic Sound album the next year.

Beaver & Krause also provided synthesizer and/or natural soundscapes for dozens of Hollywood films including Rosemary's Baby, Apocalypse Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Performance, Love Story, and Doctor Doolittle. Because of their extensive studio work in Hollywood, New York, and London, the duo are credited with helping to introduce the synthesizer to pop music and film.

Between 1967 and 1972, Beaver & Krause released five albums together, effectively defining the beginning of both the New Age music and Electronica musical movements.

After Beaver's death in 1975, Krause found himself more interested in soundscapes than synthesizers. At the age of 40 he returned to school and completed a doctoral degree in Creative Arts with an internship in bio-acoustics.

Soundscape Pioneer

Beaver & Krause's album In A Wild Sanctuary, recorded in 1968 and '69, had been the first to incorporate natural soundscapes as an integral component of the orchestration, and to address the theme of ecology (coincidentally it was also the first album to be encoded in quadraphonic sound and surround sound).

Following the completion of his degree, Krause continued his mission of recording and archiving pristine sound environments from around the world, which are commissioned as works of art and science to museums for their dioramas and sound installations, ambient tracks for feature films, and a series of over 50 downloadable albums from the world's rare habitats. The Krause natural soundscape collection consists of more than 4,000 hours of recordings -- marine and terrestrial -- of which, sadly, it is now estimated that over 50% comes from habitats that are altogether silent or so compromised by human intervention that the natural soundscapes are no longer viable.

In Fall of 1985 Krause and a colleague, Diana Reiss, helped lure Humphrey the Whale, a migrating humpback who had wandered into Sacramento River Delta and apparently got lost, back to the Pacific Ocean. They used recordings of humpbacks feeding, recorded by two graduate students from the University of Hawaii [4].

Krause's 1988 CD album, Gorillas in the Mix (Rykodisc), is composed entirely from samples of animal sounds, played from sampling keyboards.

In 2007, Krause demonstrated at the O'Reilly Media Where 2.0 Conference a KML layer to Google Earth and Google Maps that makes it possible to listen to the soundscapes from all over the world. He plans to make part of his sounds collection available via this add-on and is currently seeking an academic home for his archive and related soundscape programs.

Discography

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ www.wildsanctuary.com/niche.pdf
  2. ^ "Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape," BioScience, Mar, 2011, Vol. 61, No. 3
  3. ^ "Notes From the Wild," Krause 1996, Ellipsis Arts
  4. ^ "Into A Wild Sanctuary," Krause 1998, Heyday Books

External links