Calls of the Wild; October 2008; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Tennesen; 1 Page(s)

The eureka moment for Bernie Krause, a bioacoustics expert, came when he was on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya recording the natural ambient sounds of birds, animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians for the California Academy of Sciences. As a former player of the Moog synthesizer for George Harrison, the Doors and other 1960s rock musicians, he had made a spectrograph of a natural soundscape and realized that ¿it looked like a musical score,¿ he recalls. "Each animal had its own niche, its own acoustic territory, much like instruments in an orchestra."

How well these natural musicians played together, Krause concludes, says good deal about the health of the environment. He argues that many animals evolved to vocalize in available niches so they can be heard by mates and others of their kind, but noise from human activity¿from airplanes flying overhead to rumbling tires on a nearby road¿threatens an animal¿s reproductive success.