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00:30We're basically a visual culture, and we've learned about the world primarily from what
00:40we see.
00:41I don't see very well, so I have to look at the world in a different way.
00:59One of the reasons that I record in the field, and the main reason that I record, is because
01:03it makes me feel good.
01:09I also have a terrible case of ADHD.
01:14Audiovisual sound in particular has helped me moderate the effects.
01:19Is this a shot?
01:22Is this a shot?
01:25Remember, this is being recorded.
01:28This is kind of fun.
01:45So, if you want to know how to learn to feel good and relaxed and be part of the living
01:50world around you, get involved in listening to it, because it's fabulous.
01:57Just open up your window in the springtime and listen to a bird singing.
02:06In the process of learning how to listen to the natural world and to capture it on tape,
02:12I learned what I could see was kind of fooling me, but when I listened to it, I got a very
02:19different impression.
02:21We can always frame a shot with a camera so that it looks just right, like you're doing
02:25right now, but you cannot fool the ear that way.
02:36It's kind of like Saint-Exupery's little prince idea, what is essential is invisible to the
02:42eye.
02:43I love that.
02:44I love that.
03:44I think of soundscapes and the biophonies as kind of a proto-orchestra.
04:06When we evolved as Homo sapiens, the sounds that informed us and informed our culture
04:11were the sounds of the natural world, and we imitated them, and they're very much a
04:15part of our DNA.
04:21It's a narrative of place, for one thing, but it also informs you about religion, about
04:27biology, about medicine.
04:30It informs resource management.
04:32It informs things as broad-ranging as architecture and music.
04:38These soundscapes are important to our lives, they're important to our health, they're important
04:44to our culture.
04:58Without sound, there would be no music, no legend, no voice to stir the soul.
05:28I began working in Hollywood in 1966.
05:47Like in Apocalypse Now, I did the helicopter sounds, and I also did a third of the score.
05:53At just that period, we introduced the synthesizer to pop music and film, but people weren't
05:58really sure how to use it.
06:01Coppola was smart enough to know that he could use it not only to foley a particular kind
06:05of sound, but also as an expression of music.
06:10I was part of several teams that Coppola hired and fired over a period of time.
06:15I was actually fired eight times.
06:17I was often told I'd never work again in Hollywood, but each time he hired me back, I got double
06:22the amount of money.
06:24I was hoping I'd get fired ten more times.
06:28I worked on well over 135 feature films, and we were working sometimes 80 hours a week.
06:36I was feeling really stressed working in Hollywood, big deal with drugs and a lot of egos, and
06:41I didn't feel like getting fired anymore, so I quit Hollywood.
06:58I began recording in 1968.
07:12I started recording natural world sounds in 1968.
07:17It was a result of an album that Paul Beaver and I were doing for Warner Brothers called
07:22In a Wild Sanctuary.
07:24It was also the first album on ecology.
07:30It meant that one of us had to go into the field and record, but I grew up in a family
07:35that was terrified of animals, and I knew nothing much about the outside world.
07:41Off into the field I marched.
07:43I didn't know very much about it.
07:44I went to a place that I thought was totally wild, Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco,
07:51and I was scared to death.
08:03But when I turned on that recorder and listened to the sound open up, it was magic to me.
08:08It was as if my whole world had been gifted with this wonderful opportunity.
08:38So, of course, it's going to start in about ten minutes.
08:57Yeah, we got to go.
09:05There have been a number of attempts at defining what it is that I do.
09:09One of the older attempts was the idea of acoustic ecology.
09:16Although I started at that point where we were recording individual sounds, taking them
09:21out of context, it wasn't something that I was interested in.
09:26I heard the natural world as a symphony of sound, much more holistically, and that's
09:31why I began to record, and that's why I've been recording ever since.
09:35Test one, test two, testing.
10:04Not only could I record for my own pleasure, but also I could capture this material and
10:09have a scientific record of what we were hearing.
10:13Okay, we're at Sugar Loaf State Park, elevation 1,300 feet.
10:18Temperature is 47 degrees, wind light, humidity in the high 80s.
10:25Early on I established a recording protocol, which I've used for the last 30 years, which
10:30is pretty strict.
10:31Recorder is a Sound Devices 702, sampling rate 48.
10:36I can repeat any of those studies by going into the field and recording again using the
10:42same kinds of calibrations.
11:03Acoustic ecology evolved for me into what I call soundscape ecology, because it's more
11:10directed at what we're doing.
11:11We're dealing with soundscapes as they inform the ecology idea of the science.
11:35Sound began when the planet was forming, four and a half billion years ago.
11:42The earliest sounds were the geophonies, the non-biological sound, because it was a time
11:47on earth when there wasn't any biology.
11:50Sounds of volcanoes erupting, water in the stream, movement of the earth, waves at the
11:58ocean shore.
12:27The second kinds of sounds were the biological sounds, because every living organism produces
12:38some kind of signal, either through its metabolism or through its structure.
12:43We get signal from things as small as a virus, and have, we've recorded them.
12:49I call those the biophony, bio meaning life, and phone from the Greek meaning sound, the
12:54sounds of life.
13:20Then there was humans.
13:39And so I called it anthropophony.
13:47I've made that distinction because I feel that we especially have had such an impact
13:53on not only the natural world, but on the health of our own lives as a result of the
13:59noise that we create.
14:21Imagine if we got a jet plane.
14:39While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.
14:50Because we have this rational way of looking at the world, we know our world from what
14:55we see.
14:57We have to learn to know it from what we hear.
15:01In 1988, I heard that a logging company was trying to convince local residents in the
15:07Sierras that there'd be no impact from the selective logging that they wanted to do,
15:12which is a new technique, taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a
15:16whole forest.
15:18So I recorded just before when they began the logging operation, and then again a year
15:23later just after the operation.
15:26Now these are two pictures taken at the same time of these recordings in Lincoln Meadow.
15:32And you can see that not a stick or a tree looks out of place.
15:38The ear tells us a very different story.
15:57The stream is still there, but notice what's missing in the middle third of that spectrogram.
16:05The birds are all gone.
16:06And with the exception of a woodpecker at the end of it, there's very little to be heard.
16:27Okay, here's a humpback.
16:29Here's a recording nobody else has.
16:31This is humpback whales doing bubble netting.
16:33And so the whale is blowing the bubbles, causing the fish and krill to gather in the
16:40middle.
16:41And then it swims down very quickly and opens up its big maw and swims up, scooping up these
16:46large quantities of fish.
16:49Then at the very end, he lets out this vocalization that signals to all the other humpbacks in
16:55the area, he's got food, come on.
17:045.8, 5.4, 7.6, okay.
17:10In the work that I've done, what I found after 30 years of recording in the field was
17:15that when I listened back to my library and wanted to go back to many places that I had
17:19previously recorded, they weren't there anymore.
17:23The habitats had changed so radically that they were either altogether silent or just
17:29completely unrecognizable in terms of their soundscape.
17:33This is just outside of Jackson Hole.
17:44The whole idea behind what I just played is a result of global warming.
17:49And the reason for that is because spring is occurring two weeks earlier than it previously
17:53did in 1981 when I first recorded.
17:57We've seen evidence of the effect of global warming that's expressed through the natural
18:02soundscape, through the biophony, because it's changed radically.
18:08This is Coral Reef in Vanua-Levu, Fiji.
18:12They sound a lot like static.
18:23That's the dying part of the reef.
18:26It's just like our voice.
18:28When a habitat is under stress or it's sick, when we're under stress or sick, our voice
18:32changes.
18:56That's the dying part of the reef.
19:26By 2015, it was a silent spring.
19:45There was not only no water running in the stream because there was no rain, but also
19:51there were no birds singing, and there were lots of birds.
19:55Birds all around.
19:56You could see them everywhere, but they weren't singing.
19:58They were completely silent.
20:17From the Industrial Revolution to this time, much of the world that was so vibrant has
20:25disappeared.
20:30I kind of marked this moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
20:35What happened when the Berlin Wall fell, it wasn't communism that died.
20:41It was capitalism that died, the democratic capitalism that we understood.
20:46It was kind of under control because workers had a say in what was going on in their world.
20:55But when that died, the access to the resources in our capitalistic culture were opened up
21:02to everybody.
21:05Oil drilling, mining, the extraction was accelerated.
21:10Forests started to fall at a much quicker rate.
21:13Seventy percent of the insects have disappeared in parts of the world.
21:18That collapse is happening pretty much everywhere.
21:21And it's happening at such a rapid pace now that in the last ten years, I've seen changes
21:27that I just wouldn't have believed would be that radical.
21:35More than 70 percent of all the creatures in the world have disappeared.
21:4170 percent of all the creatures and living organisms no longer exist and are silent.
21:49Everything is beginning to indicate to us, especially through this work that I'm doing,
21:55that our planet is becoming remarkably quiet.
22:00And that's a frightening thing to me.
22:11This film was made with the support of the World Wildlife Fund
22:15and the World Wildlife Fund.
22:17World Wildlife Fund
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22:52World Wildlife Fund
23:01About 2.15, 2.20 in the morning, I was watching television
23:09And there was a shot of the front line of the fire on the screen.
23:15And I looked at the front door, which is a glass door,
23:18and I thought I saw a reflection of the fire on the television set.
23:23But it was the whole hillside that had just burst into flame.
23:28And so without our cell phones, without our cats, without anything,
23:34we scrambled to the car and we drove through a wall of flames.
23:39¶¶ ¶¶
23:50I have no words to really describe what happened
23:56the night of the wildfires or this sixteen-month sense.
24:02¶¶ ¶¶
24:07The night the fire absolutely and astonishingly engulfed the entire area
24:15around our home with such immediacy and such ferocious presence, a superseded
24:23intellect, becoming a deer in the forest faced by something like fire. That's my
24:31only reference is thinking maybe back to my childhood in a scene out of Bambi or
24:36something where the deer took off automatically.
24:43There's no process there that says, oh you're in danger, run. Your body just
24:50moves. I understand now that disaster is a great leveler. Disaster isn't just what
25:00happens at the time of the flood or the fire or the earthquake or the tornado.
25:04Disaster is what comes after when you have devastated communities, when you
25:09have decimated economies, when you have people's lives that are trying to
25:14rebuild without the kind of social structures in place to really help them
25:19do that. The connection between the fires and
25:24global warming is really a complex one. Everything was so dry and there's the
25:30issue of liability on the part of PG&E because they didn't cut the trees back
25:34far enough from the power lines and when the winds came up that night, they
25:39just blew the trees branches against it and they were very dry from the drought.
25:42Consequently, they arced and sparked and caused the fires in Napa which spread
25:49390 square miles, wiped out over 14,000 homes.
25:55What I can say now clearly is that we saw the face of global warming and it
26:00was on our front porch. The irony of having known about the threat of global
26:10warming, having worked in environmental things for decades, having understood what
26:16the predictability of science was showing and yet having it show up around
26:23us in such a dramatic way and being so completely unprepared for it.
26:30I lost all my journals, I lost all the original tapes, I lost all the equipment.
26:35Fortunately, because of the current political situation here in the
26:39anti-science climate that we live in, I had made a backup copy of my entire
26:45library six months before the fire.
26:53What do we miss most about Wild Sanctuary? Well, the place was a
27:03combination of a great sound library, a lot of history. I mean, it was a wildlife
27:09corridor so we had mountain lions, we had bears, we had all kinds of critters that
27:14would come and visit us. We had a mountain lion that would sit in the tree just
27:17outside our door and never bothered our cats, never bothered us. 200-pound male,
27:22there he was. Yeah, it was pretty special. Just about at any given time, someone was
27:30going to come through the front door to talk to Bernie or to get a story or to
27:35find out something about equipment or to listen to some sounds or to bring their
27:40children by. I missed that. I missed the sense of safety that I had before we
27:48lost Wild Sanctuary that I don't know that I'll ever have again. I do miss the
27:53books in the library. I do miss our cats. We lost a life.
28:00I started going to Sugarloaf State Park in 1993. When I go early in the morning,
28:26there's nobody there and it's really quiet.
28:32It's one of these magical places that still exists as close by.
28:40I spend an hour there and it can fuel me for the whole week.
28:44When I started this work, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material.
28:57Now it actually takes me close to a thousand hours.
29:04Not only does it take me much longer to record,
29:07but there's much less of it. And no matter where I go, it's diminishing in its specter.
29:14The density and diversity is going. There aren't as many birds. There aren't as many birds singing.
29:20There aren't as many insects. There aren't as many frogs. There aren't as many mammals around.
29:29I'm losing my favorite things that tie me to the living world.
29:38And yet, while I'm not optimistic, I am hopeful.
29:44The soundscapes are these stories. Basically, what that is, is an expression of life.
29:57Of these animals screaming out to us, hopeful, in a way that expresses the desire to continue.
30:10And that to me is the biggest message of all and I love that.
30:14Because that's part of my soul. I have a desire to live and to be part of the living world.
30:38Last question. If you could say one thing to get all of us to listen now, what would it be?
30:45You know, I've got to the point now where I can say anything I want.
30:50And if I could get people to listen, how would I do that? I would just tell them to shut the f*** up.