Niche hypothesis

The niche hypothesis, an early version of the term biophony, describes the acoustic bandwidth partitioning process that occurs in still-wild biomes by which non-human organisms adjust their vocalizations by frequency and time-shifting to compensate for vocal territory occupied by other vocal creatures. Thus each species evolves to establish and maintain its own acoustic bandwidth so that its voice is not masked. For instance, notable examples of clear partitioning and species discrimination can be found in the spectrograms derived from the biophonic recordings made in most uncompromised tropical and subtropical rain forests.

The term was first coined by soundscape ecology early practitioner, Bernie Krause.

References

• Krause, Bernie (1998). Into a Wild Sanctuary. Berkeley, California: Heyday Books. 
• Krause, Bernie (2002). Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World. Berkeley, California: Wilderness Press. 
• Krause, Bernie (31 January 2001). Loss of Natural Soundscape: Global Implications of Its Effect on Humans and Other Creatures. World Affairs Council, San Francisco, California. 
• Bernie Krause, Stuart H. Gage, Wooyeong Joo, Measuring and interpreting the temporal variability in the soundscape at four places in Sequoia National Park, Landscape Ecology, DOI 10.1007/s10980-011-9639-6, Aug. 2011,
• Sueur, Jérome, Cicada acoustic communication: potential sound partitioning in a multi species community from Mexico (Hemiptera: Cicadomorpha: Cicadidae), Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2002, 75, 379-394
• Hull J (18 February 2007). "The Noises of Nature". Idea Lab (New York Times Magazine). 
• Krause B (2008). "Anatomy of the Soundscape". Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 56 (1/2). 
• Bryan C. Pijanowski, Luis J. Villanueva-Rivera, Sarah L. Dumyahn, Almo Farina, Bernie L. Krause, Brian M. Napoletano, Stuart H. Gage, and Nadia Pieretti,Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape, BioScience, March, 2011, Vol. 61 No. 3, 203-216