Background

Bernie Krause was born on December 8, 1938, in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He is a son of Sydney A. and Guilda (Warshawsky) Krause.

Education

Bernie Krause studied at the University of Michigan where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960. He also attended Union Institute & University and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Creative (Sound) Arts with an internship in bioacoustics in 1981. Krause also studied electronic music at Mills College.

Career

Bernie Krause started his musical career at a young age, playing jazz and blues among others. He was a singer in a band The Weavers from 1963 to 1964. Soon he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in order to study electronic music at Mills College. In 1966 he and Paul Beaver formed Beaver & Krause. They served as the Moog company's sales representatives on the U.S. West Coast and also composed electronic music. Together Beaver and Krause bought one of the first Moog synthesizers and learned to create new sounds with it. In 1967 they released The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music that was a pioneering work in the electronic music genre. The next album In A Wild Sanctuary was recorded in 1968. The duo ended with Beaver's premature death in January 1975.

Bernie Krause has concentrated on the recording and archiving of wild natural soundscapes. In 1985 he and a professor of psychology Diana Reiss helped Humphrey the Whale, that had wandered into Sacramento River Delta, get back to the Pacific Ocean. Krause offered the recordings he had made of humpback whale feeding songs as a possible way to lure him out. Krause founded an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes called Wild Sanctuary. In 1988, he released his album Gorillas in the Mix. He then created natural sound albums, and soundscapes and sound sculptures for zoos, aquaria, and museums.

In 2014, Krause recorded and released on CD The Great Animal Orchestra: Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes. This symphony was performed at the Cheltenham Music Festival by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. In 2015, Krause with friend and colleague, Richard Blackford, premiered the score for their first ballet, "Biophony". He took part in TED Global talk at the 2013 Edinburgh conference. He also wrote books about natural sounds. One of his latest books was published in 2016.

Achievements

• Bernie Krause is an American musician, writer and soundscape ecologist who is famous for his books about natural sounds and for his records of natural soundscapes. He coined such terms as geophony, biophony, and anthropophony.
  
  Krause is a principal founder of the field of soundscape ecology, a sub-category of ecoacoustics. He created a massive library of natural soundscapes. These records were presented at the first major natural soundscape exhibit in a contemporary art museum in Paris in 2016. In 2018, he received the Moog Innovation Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

    (The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's purs...)

    2012
  • Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World, Revised Edition

    (This rewritten and updated edition explains the newest te...)

    2016
  • Notes from the wild: The nature recording expeditions of Bernie Krause 1996
  • Into a Wild Sanctuary: A Life in Music & Natural Sound 1998
  • Voices of the Wild 2016

• music

  • Great Animal Orchestra 2014
  • Ocean Dreams 1994
  • Ocean Wonders 1991
  • Prairie Winds 2002
  • Amazon Days, Amazon Nights 1999
  • Winds Across the Tundra 2002
  • A Wild Christmas 1994
  • Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music 1967
  • Gorillas in the Mix 1988
  • In A Wild Sanctuary 1970

Views

Quotations: "A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening".

"With my portable recording system, I didn't feel like I was listening as a distant observer; rather, I had been sucked into a new space – becoming an integral part of the experience itself".

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

Membership

Bernie Krause is a member of Audio Engineering Society, California Academy of Sciences, Explorer’s Club, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Connections

Bernie Krause married a woman named Katherine.

Father:

Sydney A. Krause

Mother:

Guilda Warshawsky