hear, or listen?

It is incredible how much more one can hear, if one decides to 'listen'. Musician Bernie Krause discovered the sounds of trees, animals and birds, while on a commission to make an album incorporating long segments of wild sounds.

'The way he describes what he hears through his recording equipment will make you want to put on a pair of headphones and sit in the forest for a day, tethered to a microphone. That’s what Krause first did in the fall of 1968, when he switched on his portable recorder in Muir Woods, a grove of coastal redwoods north of San Francisco:

The ambience was transformed into minute detail that I would have never caught with my ears alone—the sounds of my breathing; the slight movement of a foot adjusted into a more comfortable position; a sniffle; a bird landing nearby on the ground, stirring up leaves and then pushing air with its wing beats in short, quick puffs as it took off, alarmed.

I realized, even then, that wild sound might contain huge stores of valuable information just waiting to be unraveled. But to that point in my life, I’d had no way of understanding that the natural world was filled with so much wondrous chatter.' 

Source:A review of The Great Animal Orchestra By Dawn Stover 

http://conservationmagazine.org/2012/05/the-lost-art-of-listening/

Bernard L. "Bernie" Krause (born December 8, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan), founder of Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes, is an American musician, author, soundscape recordist and bio-acoustician, who coined the term biophony and helped define the structure of soundscape ecology.Since 1979, Krause has concentrated almost exclusively on the recording and archiving pristine sound environments from around the world. These recordings are commissioned as works of art and science by museums for their dioramas and sound installations in many countries, and as ambient tracks for numerous feature films, and as over 50 downloadable field recording albums from the world's rare habitats.

credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Krause

for more, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feexRcCHh3k