Bernard L. Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. In 1968, he founded Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes. Krause is an author, a bio-acoustician, a speaker, and natural sound artist who coined the terms geophony, biophony, and anthropophony.
Krause in 2013
Soundscape ecology is the study of the acoustic relationships between living organisms, human and other, and their environment, whether the organisms are marine or terrestrial. First appearing in the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology edited by Barry Truax, in 1978, the term has occasionally been used, sometimes interchangeably, with the term acoustic ecology. Soundscape ecologists also study the relationships between the three basic sources of sound that comprise the soundscape: those generated by organisms are referred to as the biophony; those from non-biological natural categories are classified as the geophony, and those produced by humans, the anthropophony.
A spectrogram of the soundscape of Mount Rainier National Park in the United States. Highlighted areas show marmot, bird, insect and aircraft noises.
Natural soundscapes include natural but non-biological "geophonic" sounds (such as the water of the ocean) and the "biophonic" sounds of animals (such as bird calls).
Anthropophony, sound generated from human activities, plays an important role in contemporary soundscapes.
Effects of anthropophony on auditory communication are well studied in the great tit.
