I have heard the cottonwoods singing - Bernie Krause's recording of nature's sounds

Sunset, August, 1999 by Peter Fish

The sound - syncopated, percussive - could be the rhythm section behind Celia Cruz: a pop-pop-pop that puts you in mind of rumbas and rum drinks. But this is not a salsa band. It is the song of a Utah cottonwood tree as water rises through its vascular system.

"It was after a long drought," Bernie Krause explains. "Then we had a hard day of rain. The tree began to suck up water. We drilled a hole and put a hydrophone inside. What you hear is water moving up, changing the osmotic pressure in the cells. They expand and pop."

The cottonwood is only one of Krause's greatest hits. If he had a radio show along the lines of Casey Kasem's American Top 40, he could fill it not with Backstreet Boys but with Mono Lake spade-foot toads and the singing sand dunes of Death Valley. Krause is among the world's experts at recording the sounds nature makes, when mankind lets nature get a word in edgewise.

Krause, a young-looking 60, is noticeably soft-spoken - perhaps the result of spending hours holding microphones up to insect larvae. He lives with his wife, Katherine, in Sonoma County, California, in a hillside house built of rammed earth. "Earth walls don't oscillate the way normal construction does," Krause explains.

The earthen house, his series of compact discs with titles like Ocean Dreams - Krause's life and work possess a certain soothing New Age aura. But the path to his present life was noisily circuitous. In the '60s he was an aspiring folk singer who shared stages with the Weavers. By the 1970s he was a studio musician in Los Angeles, coping with the egos and deteriorated septums of that life-in-the-fast-lane era of pop music history. "It was a very exciting time," Krause says. "There was a lot of money to be spent on talented people. But the industry was too drug dependent."

Still, out of this chaos, something lasting emerged. The gifted, eccentric musician Van Dyke Parks wanted to produce a record that incorporated natural sounds. He sent Krause into the redwood groves of Muir Woods, north of San Francisco. The results were disastrous. The season - late fall - was wrong for bird calls; Krause was not adept with his microphones. He brought back nothing. And yet he was hooked.

Krause takes me to his recording studio. It was built to resemble the rammed-earth house and has a certain womblike quality. After the Muir Woods debacle, he explains, he trained himself in recording techniques and also in becoming comfortable with the wilderness. "I grew up in the city," he says, "in a family terrified of the environment. A poodle was a wild animal. There wasn't anything I wasn't afraid of. I had to get over that fear."

He must have done so. In the years since, Krause has recorded bullhead whales in Alaska, sawing a hole in Arctic Sea ice, then pushing a hydrophone into the water. He has recorded gorillas in Rwanda. He believes he has amassed the world's largest private library of natural sounds, animal cries and whispers, which can be heard on his compact discs, in motion picture sound tracks, and in natural history museums. If you walk into an exhibit on, say, frogs, there is a good chance Krause supplied the croaking.

The trouble is, says Krause, nature's symphonies are being drowned out by manmade din. "It used to take me 10 to 15 hours to record one hour of useful material," he says. "Now it takes me 2,000." Even in remote regions, it has become nearly impossible to hear nature uninterrupted. "I get all sorts of noise. Chain saws. Snowmobiles. Aircraft."

Krause puts on another tape. We hear an enormous gong: an Aleutian walrus exhaling through his air sac. Another tape begins. The room fills with sinister hissing. "A desert tortoise," Krause says.

"Our problem," he continues, "is that sound is not important to our culture. We know our world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding."

When it's time to go, I head outside into a sunny afternoon. I hear nothing special: distant traffic, the drone of a light plane. I concentrate. The breeze sifting through live oaks is the sound of rustling sheets. A scrub jay's squawk is the bark of a drill instructor. I listen as if I'd been wearing earplugs all my life and had only now removed them.