Sunday
Aug062017
Great Animal Orchestra
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Bernie Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. He has been recording, researching and archiving soundscapes for over 40 years.
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Recently I was at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMa). Part of the Cartier Foundation’s exhibition which is on, is “Great Animal Orchestra” by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists.
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It celebrates the work of Krause’s work, adding a simple but fitting and room-filling spectrogram to the recorded soundscapes, emerging the listener in sound, and being able to recognise the animals with visual cues. Here’s a 360-degrees video, if your browser can play that:
The idea is quite simple, but the soundscapes are compelling and diverse. While it can sometimes be hard to get an audience interested in sound-based works in a museum, United Visual Artists did a great job of adding a simple visual counterpart to keep those who aren’t used to only listen to sound, interested.
If you want to know more about the work of Bernie Krause, I suggest watching this TED Talk about “The voice of the natural world”.
As Krause states in this talk: “…while a picture might be worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures”.