Bernie Krause is a musician and sound recorder. In over 40 years, he has collected nearly 5000 hours of wild sound recordings in natural habitats: sounds of animals, of the wind, rain, water or vegetation.
In the wake of the exhibition opening on July 2016 at the Cartier Foundation, The Grand Animal Orchestra offers you to engage in a unique interactive way with some of the work of Bernie Krause and to discover the concept he created, the « soundscapes« . A custom made website that contains 5 original modules:
- Acoustic niches – Gonarezhouk, Zimbabwe
- Learning to listen – Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada
- Sonic Degradation – Crescent Meadow, Sequoia Park, California
- Orchestrations of the Wild – Yukon Delta Refuge, Alaska
- Oceans – The Pacific Rim (multiple locations)
“Our society is suffering from a profound sound culture deficit.” Bernie Krause
Each module lets you discover the world of biophony through specific soundscapes, each with their own locality and temporality. In the form of a large orchestra, where you play the part of the conductor.
After some manipulations, one quickly get to see both the scope and challenges that emerge from these soundscapes: the unique opportunity to hear the language of our nature, as one can listen to a living organism. And evidence that we might perhaps have lost sight of, like the ability to listen to the effects of human activity on nature, or to use sound to determine the health of an ecosystem.
This orchestra is divided according to the frequency of the emitted signal: lower frequencies on the left, the highest right. Explore for yourself this great animal orchestra or be guided by Bernie Krause in the English version and the artist Camille in the French version.
This interactive experience is a companion interactive experience to the exhibition The Great Animal Orchestra presented by the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, from July 2, 2016 to January 8, 2017. The exhibition brings together artists from around the world and invites the public to immerse themselves in an aesthetic meditation, both audio and visual, around an animal world that is increasingly threatened.
