The Great Animal Orchestra
The Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has created a virtual presentation to celebrate Bernie Krause‘s 50 years of nature recordings.
From July 2, 2016 to January 8, 2017, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents The Great Animal Orchestra, inspired by the work of American musician and bioacoustician Bernie Krause. The exhibition, which brings together artists from all over the world, invites its audience to immerse themselves in an aesthetic meditation, both aural and visual, on an animal kingdom that is increasingly under threat.
As an extension of the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, the online presentation of The Great Animal Orchestra provides visitors the opportunity to conduct nature’s vast musical ensemble. Guided by the voices of Bernie Krause in English, singer Camille in French and musician Orlando Morais in Brazilian, the site, developed by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, unveils the mysteries of the acoustic harmony of the animal kingdom, offering an unprecedented interactive experience that reveals the ecology of the soundscape and the forces behind it.
For more information on Bernie Krause’s works and his Wild Sanctuary Audio Archive, please visit:
Wild Sanctuary
“The Wild Sanctuary Audio Archive represents a vast and important collection of whole-habitat field recordings and precise metadata dating from the late 1960s. This unique bioacoustic resource contains marine and terrestrial soundscapes representing the voices of living organisms from larvae to large mammals and the numerous tropical, temperate and Arctic biomes from which they come. The catalog currently contains over 4,500 hours of wild soundscapes and in excess of 15,000 identified life forms.
Fully half of the natural soundscapes in this rare set are from habitats that no longer exist, are radically altered because of human endeavor, or have gone altogether silent”-wildsanctuary.com
Sonic Gallery 