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Bernie Krause's avatar

Becuase the natural world is always testing for optimum performance (given all the parameters extant in a given biome/habitat) no biophonic performance is the same...ever. It's always in a mutable state in terms of density, diversity and richness. The American robin singing outside our window each spring, sings from different locations, sometimes out of a nearby tree, sometimes others at different distances, sometimes alone, sometimes vying with others for some selective result.

There are lots of contradictions to what professional field recordists do, some touched on in this article, all too many not. I seriously doubt that this post-viral era will be the end of a "golden" one. I suspect, instead, it is merely the beginning of another, albeit a progressively more silent one, owing much to our great failures to come to terms with issues having no relationship to our gentle art and craft.

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Jeff Curtis's avatar

I found this particularly interesting, partially because I love field recording myself (one of my bandcamp releases from last year was essentially an environmental field recording with me playing banjo among the sounds of cicadas and crickets etc: https://coffeehut.bandcamp.com/album/beaver-creek), and partially because I'm a huge fan of the Anthology.

I remember from my college classes and other readings in Anthropology and other related fields about the concept of how just observing something can fundamentally change it. (Not sure if Schroedinger's cat fits in with this or not, but it might..) Certainly when cultural things become widespread and more widely known, they can influence the culture, and also likewise become influenced by that culture. That's how cultures evolve. And as folk music (and other folk arts) is popularized, it, too, evolves, and arguably can become more interesting even as it becomes less pure.

But the main thrust of your piece here seems more about the devolution of our planet; which, of course, is just another aspect of the evolution of our world (a scary one, no doubt). But that devolution is part of what's being documented, too.

This recent Atlantic article by Ed Yong, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/light-noise-pollution-animal-sensory-impact/638446/, talking about human quickening of our planetary devolution, mentions how sound can be important to undersea life, particularly in coral reefs. It talks about how earlier recordings of healthy coral reef sounds have more recently been used to help restore some of these damaged reefs by playing back the earlier recordings via underwater speakers, which seem to be attracting some species back to the reefs who had previously abandoned them. So there really is a practical use for some of these field recordings!

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