“Ever heard a tree singing?”
asks noted composer and bioacoustician Bernie Krause.
“It's 70 kHz,” he adds as he reaches for a CD-R in his spartan Northern California studio. The CD that accompanied Krause's recent book, Wild Soundscapes (reviewed in the December 2002 issue), included singing ants, aquatic insect larvae, and the hair-raising growl of an Amazonian jaguar.
The singing sand dunes and the calving glaciers mentioned in the text didn't make the CD, so they were first on my request list as our interview wound down.
Nonetheless, I was not prepared to hear the sounds of a tree.
“We were listening for the sounds of bats,” Krause continued,
“which are up in the 47-plus kHz range.
And we heard a steady signal, very unbiological in the sense of it being from a creature.
As we moved closer to this cottonwood tree, the signal level increased.
We drilled a little hole in the tree and put this hydrophone in.
We had an instrumentation device with us that could record a frequency that high, and we got a signal coming from the trunk of the tree.
We couldn't figure out what it was.
Then we slowed it down by a factor of seven, to get it down within our hearing range.”
As we listened to the tree's music, I was startled by the regularity of its pulse and the subtle rhythmic accents.
It was as if we were hearing a recording of a virtuosic percussionist playing woodblocks.
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© 2004 Primedia Business Magazines and Media. AppendumAnnapurna, a friend on myspace mailed me a comment:
Speaking of trees and their sounds, I recently heard of the phenomenon of Anastasia, and the Ringing Cedars of Russia. This has apparently created an enormous 'back to the land' movement in rural Russia, and a resurgence of spirituality. www.ringingcedars.com
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