TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Bernie Krause: The voice of the natural world

Unscramble the Blue Letters

(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and vieusrs created a snuod signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the plnaet, like the azoman rrnafosiet you're hearnig behind me. In fact, tetmparee and trciaopl rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that itnentuonasas and orzaigend expression of itnescs, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that sigrnps from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to srahe with you today. The soundscape is made up of three bsaic sources. The first is the geophony, or the ngbianloocoil sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, weavs at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the bnphooiy. The biophony is all of the sound that's ganreteed by osamirngs in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is conolrtled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild sdunsoacpes to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to eaavtlue the health of a habitat across the entire scptuerm of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical mtedhos of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual seiceps like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the mnaegfccniie of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single vliion pyelar out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable matraeil, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 huros or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from hatbtais so radically altered that they're either aoegthlter silent or can no longer be herad in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually ciuontng the numbers of species and the nberums of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to avrrie at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the potiissiblies uonlkced by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour dvire east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many yeras. In 1988, a longgig company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a sergctaporm. A spectrogram is a gapihrc illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while brids that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (nurate sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conoindits, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to lnliocn Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet rtrenued to anything like it was before the oetaproin. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. yunog students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the sorhe in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool fleild with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jlleiysfh. And curious to see if any of them made any nsoie, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater mioropnhce covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and imdtalemeiy the cirettr began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nttinuraoil value. The static-like sodnus that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, fogrs will dig themselves to the sfrucae and gather around these large, vernal pools in graet numbers. And they vzoclaie in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two reosans. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very hetlahy pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in crnflaoiia, and it's a favorite hatiabt of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who tarin in their fighters flying them at seepds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground leevl of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very btotom of the page. (Frogs cnioarkg) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing shnortnyicicy, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have ptrtey much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial suejbct among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one afnortoen, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, derppod a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, kilinlg the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone snivrviug male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out ilbscnoolany for its lost mate and ofnfrpsig. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard cnmiog from any ogiransm, hmaun or other. (bveear crying) Yeah. Well. There are many fctaes to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals tguhat us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the ntarual world. You've heard the icpamt of resource extraction, human noise and habitat dcroiuttesn. And where emovaitennnrl sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the stauirnge voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a snsee of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape relvaes much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture imliclptiy frames a ltiiemd frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 wodrs, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural soercus of our lives, which indeed may hold the seetrcs of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Open Cloze

(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and _______ created a _____ signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the ______, like the ______ __________ you're _______ behind me. In fact, _________ and ________ rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that _____________ and _________ expression of _______, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that _______ from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to _____ with you today. The soundscape is made up of three _____ sources. The first is the geophony, or the _____________ sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, _____ at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the ________. The biophony is all of the sound that's _________ by _________ in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is __________, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild ___________ to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to ________ the health of a habitat across the entire ________ of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical _______ of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual _______ like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the ____________ of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single ______ ______ out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable ________, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 _____ or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from ________ so radically altered that they're either __________ silent or can no longer be _____ in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually ________ the numbers of species and the _______ of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to ______ at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the _____________ ________ by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour _____ east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many _____. In 1988, a _______ company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a ___________. A spectrogram is a _______ illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while _____ that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (______ sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same __________, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to _______ Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet ________ to anything like it was before the _________. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. _____ students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the _____ in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool ______ with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and _________. And curious to see if any of them made any _____, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater __________ covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and ___________ the _______ began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of ___________ value. The static-like ______ that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, _____ will dig themselves to the _______ and gather around these large, vernal pools in _____ numbers. And they ________ in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two _______. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very _______ pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in __________, and it's a favorite _______ of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who _____ in their fighters flying them at ______ exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground _____ of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very ______ of the page. (Frogs ________) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing _____________, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have ______ much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial _______ among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one _________, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, _______ a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, _______ the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone _________ male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out ____________ for its lost mate and _________. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard ______ from any ________, _____ or other. (______ crying) Yeah. Well. There are many ______ to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals ______ us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the _______ world. You've heard the ______ of resource extraction, human noise and habitat ___________. And where _____________ sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the _________ voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a _____ of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape _______ much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture __________ frames a _______ frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 _____, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural _______ of our lives, which indeed may hold the _______ of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Solution

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Original Text

(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me. In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today. The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the biophony. The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years. In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish. And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value. The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers. And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two reasons. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page. (Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other. (Beaver crying) Yeah. Well. There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction. And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
lincoln meadow	4
began recording	3
wild soundscapes	2
wild habitat	2
environmental impact	2
selective logging	2

Important Words

absolutely
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critter
croaking
crying
cultural
curious
cycle
dam
dance
data
dawn
decades
degrees
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density
desert
destruction
difficult
dig
digs
diminishing
diversity
diving
drive
dropped
dynamite
early
ears
earth
east
eat
eating
ecology
ecosystem
emerge
emotion
encounters
endowed
energy
entire
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environmental
evaluate
evaluating
evening
examples
exceeding
express
expression
extraction
eye
facets
fact
factors
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fighters
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film
find
fitness
flights
flyby
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form
formed
fortunately
foxes
fragmented
frames
francisco
frequency
frog
frogs
frontal
full
fuller
fully
game
gather
gear
generate
generated
generates
geophonies
geophony
global
good
granted
graphic
great
ground
growling
habitat
habitats
health
healthy
hear
heard
hearing
held
highest
hold
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horned
horrified
hour
hours
human
humanity
humans
hydrophone
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idea
illustrates
illustration
immediately
impact
implementing
implicitly
incoherent
inconsolably
incredible
incredibly
individual
individuals
information
insect
insects
inspiration
installation
instantaneous
institutions
introduced
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jellyfish
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killing
kilometers
lake
language
large
larvae
late
laughter
leaf
learned
left
level
life
limited
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listening
live
lives
local
logging
lone
longer
lost
lot
loud
love
lowest
machines
magnificence
male
mammals
masked
mate
material
mates
matter
meadow
meal
meter
meters
method
methods
microphone
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minutes
missing
models
moisture
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moon
mountains
mouth
movement
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music
national
natural
nature
navy
nevada
news
noise
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normal
notice
number
numbers
nutritional
occur
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offspring
older
operation
orchestra
organism
organisms
organized
original
outcomes
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owls
page
park
part
pattern
percent
permission
perspective
perspectives
pick
picture
pictures
pilots
place
planet
player
pond
pool
pools
populations
possibilities
precise
predators
pretty
produce
protocol
protocols
quantifiable
radically
rainforest
rainforests
reason
reasons
record
recorded
recording
recordings
refer
regain
relatives
remained
remarkable
represented
reptiles
residents
resource
rest
restoration
returned
reveals
rubber
sad
saddest
san
save
sciences
scope
sea
searching
seasons
seconds
secrets
selective
sense
set
share
shore
show
sierra
signature
significance
silent
sing
single
slow
soil
sound
sounds
soundscape
soundscapes
soundtrack
sources
spadefoot
spatial
speaks
species
spectrogram
spectrum
speeds
spring
springs
static
stay
stick
story
stream
strict
students
subject
suddenly
surface
surviving
swimming
symphony
sync
synchronicity
taught
temperate
tentacles
theater
thirds
thoughts
tide
ties
time
times
toad
toads
today
told
tools
top
train
tree
trees
tropical
true
typical
typically
typify
understand
understanding
understood
underwater
unique
universe
unlocked
usable
usual
valuable
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vibrant
violin
viruses
visual
visually
vocalize
vocalizing
voices
walked
walking
wanted
wardens
warming
watch
watched
water
waves
ways
west
whisper
widen
wild
wind
wonderful
woodpecker
word
words
world
worth
worthless
wrong
yeah
year
years
yellow
yosemite
young