For Bernie Krause, the sign of a healthy ecosystem is the sound it makes. The musician and Hollywood sound engineer is a pioneer of soundscape ecology, a field that uses audio recordings to better understand the natural world. The noises of all the organisms living together in a particular place—the trill of birdsong, thrum of insect wings, rustle of leaves, cacophony of yips, or a lonely midnight howl—make up that setting’s biophony, an audio signature of life. For decades, Krause has recorded biophonies from around the planet, and he noticed an overriding trend: the natural world is going quiet. As habitats and species are lost to climate change, their voices disappear. “The Last of the Nightingales,” a documentary by Masha Karpoukhina, tells the story of this loss through Krause’s firsthand stories and deep archive of recordings.
Krause has a personal connection to the environmental destruction wrought by climate disasters. In 2017, his home in Northern California burned in a wildfire. Along with their home, car, and possessions, Krause and his wife, Katherine, lost the soundscape of the oak forest that had been such an important part of their lives. Krause recalls the sounds of the resident foxes, birds, bobcats, and even a mountain lion that made their presence known and that signalled to the local human listeners the changing of the seasons. That world, and its sonic fingerprint, has disappeared. It’s a pattern that others have and will continue to experience. “Although this occurred almost eight years ago,” Krause told The New Yorker, “these fire events that happen globally deeply affect our lives, triggering memories of loss and displacement for us and others that crop up with all-too-frequent regularity.”
