panied it. It made me feel that the idea of an
orchestral piece combined with Bernie’s wild
soundscape recordings had enormous potential,
so I contacted Bernie and flew to California to
explore the idea with him.
JF: Bernie has made the assertion that science
has traditionally taken a reductionist perspective to bioacoustics and that a better way to
understand the soundscape of nature is to think
of it as an orchestra. As a composer, did you immediately sense that in the recordings? How did
you include that idea in Biophony?
RB: I decided that rather than feature individual animal sounds, however attractive, I
needed to place them in the context of their
acoustic environments. Therefore I included
substantial sections of recordings from, say, the
Borneo tropical rainforest or Algonquin wolves
howling or Arctic seals as well as individually
sampled animals. By using a sampling keyboard,
it became possible to assign whole textures or
individual sounds to notes on the keyboard and
for the player to play them live in concert with
complete control and precision.
JF: Science is a data-driven field; art, it could
be argued, is a meaning-driven field. How do
you take the data from science, in this case
Bernie’s recordings, and translate them to the
performing arts?
RB: By making a direct comparison between
the graphic display of a rich acoustic soundscape on a spectrogram and an orchestral score,
it opened up possibilities for musicians to
interpret artistically what scientists can see on
a spectrogram. [The] bioacoustics and music
merge seamlessly [into] an artistic interpretation of Bernie’s assertion that animals taught us
how to dance and sing.
JF: For