(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)
(自然之声) 45 年前,当我开始记录 野外音景的时候 完全没意识到蚂蚁、 昆虫幼虫、海葵甚至病毒 会有自己独特的声音 但它们确实有 地球上的每个野生栖息地都这样 比如你们正听到我身后 亚马逊雨林的声音。 事实上,温带雨林和热带雨林 各自像富有生气的动物管弦乐队, 昆虫、爬行动物、两栖动物、 鸟类和哺乳动物 会发出瞬时和有条理的声调。 而且每一种源自野生栖息地的音景 也会形成自己独有的特征, 其中包含了惊人的信息量 今天我想与你们分享其中一些信息 音景由三个基本源头组成。 第一为自然声 或在特定栖息地出现的 非生物声音, 比如树林中的风声,河溪流水声, 波浪拍打岸边的声音,地球的转动声。 第二为生物声 在特定的栖息地里 某个时间段和某个地方 生物体产生的声音 第三样为所有由人类产生的声音 称为人工声 其中一些是受控制的,如音乐或戏剧 但大多数是混乱和支离破碎的 我们将其称为嘈杂声。 有某段时间,我认为野外音景 就是毫无价值的人工制品, 它们只是存在着,但谈不上重要。 哦,我错了。我从这些接触认识到 仔细聆听是极具价值的工具 我们可以评估栖息地整个范围内 所有生命的健康状况。 60年代后期当我开始录音时, 典型的录音方法受到限制, 只可捕捉个别物种片断的声音, 开始时主要是鸟声, 但后来包括了哺乳动物和两栖动物 对我来说,有点像 从整个交响乐演奏中 提取出一把小提琴的声音, 而且只听那一部分, 从而去理解华丽的贝多芬第五交响曲 幸运地,越来越多机构 采用我和一些同行共同引进 到音景生态学中的模型, 而这些模型更具整体性。 40 多年前当我开始录音时, 每录制 10 小时音景 就能截取到 1 小时可用的材料, 并可用于唱片或电影原声 或博物馆陈列安置中 现在由于全球变暖、 资源榨取、 人为噪音,还包括其他许多因素 现在需要超过 1000 小时的录音 才能截取同样的音景 在我的音景档案中,整整 50 % 来自已彻底改变的栖息地中。 他们要么一片寂静, 要么再不如从前。 评估栖息地的通常方法, 是在某一特定的区域内, 清点看得见物种及其从属物种的数量 现在,通过对比密度与多样性 结合的数据 我可以得出更准确的结论 我想给你们看些例子 通过深入这宇宙, 可将其作为解开一切可能性的典型 这是林肯草甸, 位于西拉内华达山脉中, 距旧金山以东三个半小时车程, 海拔约 2000 米, 很多年前我就在那儿录音 1988 年,一家伐木公司说服当地居民 采用一种叫做「选伐」的 新伐木方法 即零星分散地砍伐 而不是把整个区域的树木全部砍伐 绝不会对环境有影响 我得到了准许, 可在那儿伐木前和伐木前后录音。 我架好设备,录下大量清晨的鸟叫声 录音都有精确的标准,且标有刻度 因为我想得到真正高质量的基线 这是一个声谱图的范例 声谱图是以图像形式表现声音 从左到右是时间 这个页面有 15 秒 从底部到顶部是频率 由最低到最高 你们可以看到溪流的识别标志 大概在图底的 1/3 至 1/2 的地方, 草甸中的鸟叫声 在图的顶部 很多鸟的叫声 接下来是伐木以前的林肯草甸声音 (自然之声) 然而,一年之后我再回到那里, 在相同条件下 用同样的标准录音 且录下了几个同样的 晨噪实例, 这就是我们现在听到的声音 这是在伐木以后的 溪流的声音还 在底部 1/3 的地方, 但请注意上方 2/3 的地方 有什么声音不见了 (自然之声) 接下来是啄木鸟的声音。 过去 25 年里 我回过林肯草甸 15 次。 我能明确告诉你们, 那个生物声的密度与多样性, 并没有回到 伐木之前的样子 这是林肯草甸伐木后的照片, 你们可从照相机 或人眼的视角看到 葱茏的树木都还在, 这证实了伐木公司的说辞 选伐不会对环境表面造成影响 可是,我们耳朵听到截然不同的故事 年轻的学生们总问我, 这些动物到底在说什么, 但我真的没有主意 但我可以告诉你们, 动物确实能表达, 我们能否理解则是另外一回事。 我曾在阿拉斯加的海滨漫步, 碰巧遇到一个潮池, 里面到处都是海葵聚居地 这种奇妙的吃货 是珊瑚和水母的近亲。 我好奇它们会否制造声音 于是我把水听器 一种用橡胶包裹的水下传声器 丢到它嘴边, 它立刻就 把扩音器吞到肚子里, 而且触手四处寻找 其他有营养价值的东西。 这种静态的声音非常低, 你们马上就会听到 (静态声) 呵呵,注意,当它没找到可吃的—— (鸣叫声) (笑声) 我想这种声音 任何人都能听懂。 (笑声) 在美国西部,大盆地犁足蟾蜍 完成繁殖周期后, 会把自己埋在距地面约一米的 坚硬沙漠土壤下 待上几个季节 直到条件适合才会再出来。 春天时,当土壤中有了足够的水分, 青蛙会回到地表, 大规模的聚集在 巨大且充满春意的水池边。 它们齐声高歌, 而且彼此同步一致 这样做有两个原因 第一个是竞争,因为它们在求偶 第二个是合作, 如果它们一齐同步发声的话 土狼、狐狸和猫头鹰等捕食者 就很难捕食到某单只青蛙。 这个声谱图就是蛙叫的表现形式, 而且是很健康的模式 (青蛙呱呱地叫) 莫诺湖在加利福利亚州 约塞米蒂国家公园的东边, 这里是一片蟾蜍喜欢的栖息地, 然而美国海军喷气机驾驶员也很喜欢, 他们在这里训练战士驾驶战斗机 时速超过 1100 千米, 贴着莫诺盆地 上方几百米飞行, 极快、极低且声音极大 这种人为噪音 你们刚才也听到了, 尽管距离在蛙塘 6.5 千米 但却掩盖了蟾蜍的鸣声 在这声谱图中,所有在前一个图中 表现出来的能量 全部从声谱图顶部消失了, 并且齐鸣中有间断,2.5 秒处、 4.5 秒处和 6.5 秒处, 之后是喷气机的声音, 特征是最底部的黄色部分 (青蛙呱呱地叫) 现在是喷气机飞过的尾声 整整45分钟后 蛙群才恢复同步齐鸣。 在这段时间里,一轮满月高挂夜空, 我们发现两只土狼和一只大角猫头鹰 抓走了几只青蛙。 好消息是,由于栖息地的恢复、 飞机噪音减少了影响, 在 80 年代和 90 年代初 一度递减的青蛙数量 现已几乎回到正常 我想用一个关于海狸的故事结束演讲, 这是一个很悲伤的故事, 但真实的展现了 动物有时也会表达情感。 这论点对一些老生物学家来说颇具争议。 有一次,我同事 在美国中西部的一个池塘附近录音 这个池塘约在 16000 年前 的冰川时期末尾形成 海狸坝也是池塘的重要组成部分, 在一端把整个生态系统连在一起, 使其保持微妙的平衡。 某天下午,正当他录音时, 突然间冒出 几个狩猎监督官, 无端端地 走到海狸坝上, 把一串炸药扔到坝底,把坝炸掉了, 炸死了许多雌海狸和年幼婴儿 同事惊呆了,他躲在后面 整理思绪 想在下午剩下的时间 录下所有他能录下的声音 当天傍晚,他发现 一件不可思议的事情, 幸存的雄海狸组成一个个圈, 在水里慢慢游着, 为死去的配偶和幼婴悲恸的哭着。 或许这是我从所有生物里 听到过最悲哀的声音, 不管是人还是其他生物 (海狸的哭声) 好的 音景还有其他方面, 其中,动物教导我们舞蹈和歌唱 我留着下次再讲。 但是你们知道了生物声 怎样帮助我们理解自然世界 你们也听说资源榨取、 人为噪音和栖所破坏的影响。 环境科学已试着通过我们所看见的 去认识这个世界, 通过我们所听见的, 可有较为充分的认识。 生物声和自然声 是自然界独特的声音。 当我们听到这些声音 就会对那地方具有感觉 就是我们居住的世界的真实故事。 在几秒钟内 从许多方面来看, 音景揭示了更多的信息 由量化数据到创作灵感。 在特定的空间范围内, 影像撷取隐含地表达局限的正面角度 而音景把那个视野范围 扩濶到360度,将我们完全包围。 如果一张图胜过千言万语, 那么一个音景就值一千张图。 耳朵告诉我们, 每一片树叶和每种生物的窃窃私语 诉说着我们生活的自然来源, 甚至包含了博爱的真谛, 尤其是人性 最后一句话就由來自 亚马逊森林的美洲豹说吧。 (咆哮声) 谢谢你的收听 (掌声)