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 [Woman] Take this card.

- Yeah!

- [Woman] I'll take some more.

- Thank you for joining us tonight for After Dark Online, Listening to the Environment. My name is Kathleen Maguire and I'm part of the team that puts together the Exploratorium's weekly After Dark Online programs, While tonight's program has been recorded remotely, I would like to acknowledge that the home of After Dark the Exploratorium is located at Pier 15 in San Francisco, an unceded territory traditionally belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone People. I pay my respects to elders past, present and future for their caretaking and shepherding of the land. At the Exploratorium, arts are a fundamental method of discovery. Throughout our museum, artworks intermingle with our hands-on science exhibits. And we've been home to an Artist-in-Residence Program since 1974. Tonight at After Dark, we'll dig a little into the intermingling of science and art through one talk and one conversation. Later in the program, we'll be listening in on a conversation with the bio acoustician, Bernie Krause, who has spent his career truly listening deeply to the environment. But first up, we'll hear from Dr. Mika Tosca. Dr. Tosca is a climate scientist, a humanist and an activist. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an Affiliate Climate Researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Her current research and public outreach explores the synthesis of art and climate science and argues that engaging with artists, designers and makers is instrumental to solving the climate crisis. Mika is an out and proud transgender scientist, she, her pronouns, and a vocal advocate for the queer and trans communities in Chicago and beyond. Dr. Tosca earned her PhD in Earth Systems Science at UC Irvine in the Earth Systems Science Department. In this talk, she'll share more about the ways that collaborations between scientists and artists can result in stronger science communication and impactful forward motion in addressing climate change. Here's Dr. Mika Tosca.

- Thanks so much for that introduction and thank you so much for inviting me to present my work today. So what I'm going to be talking about here is how we can improve climate science and science communication using art and design, kind of using art and design as a roadmap to solving the climate crisis. And of course I'm a climate scientist and so this is an issue that I care tremendously about and hopefully I can convince you that art and design really useful for not just improving the communication of science, but also for improving the scientific knowledge that is produced. So before we kind of get into the meat of this, I wanted to set the tone. Unfortunately, the climate crisis isn't the most happy tone to set, but as I was teaching a summer course two summers ago at Ox-Bow, which is a DIY Art School on the Eastern Coast of Lake Michigan looking out of the water, I was just thinking of this little paragraph that I've written here which is, "anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels has not just warmed the planet and melted the glaciers. It has forced the earth into a prolonged interglacial period that may postpone the next ice age indefinitely, a fate which has profound implications, not just for human life but for the trajectory of all life on earth for millions of years to come." So there is an urgency to the climate crisis. It's a problem that we really do have to solve in the next ASAP really. And I often like to center my audiences when I give this lecture, this type of talk by sort of questioning our understanding of what is nature. So on your own, I'm going to flip through some few photos, and I want you to look at the photo and kind of determine whether or not you think that what I'm showing is a picture depicting nature or a picture that's not depicting nature. So here's the first image. So is this nature or is this not nature? Here's another image. In your estimation, do you think that this would qualify as nature or not nature? I'm being deliberately obtuse with sort of the word nature here. How about this image? Would you consider this nature or not nature? And then finally, this image of Downtown Chicago, in your estimation, is this nature, or is this not nature? And now after kind of going through those four photos, I want you to consider these three questions. Are you a part of nature or are you separate from it? That's the first one. And then on your own, list some words or think of some words that you associate with the word natural and then some words that you associate with the word unnatural. And I have a feeling I know where this is going to go. Normally, I do this interactively but I do have a feeling where this is going to go and so I'm going to talk about that. I think most people probably answered that they consider themselves a part of nature but when they're asked to list some things that are natural, they often list trees and rocks and ponds and animals and ecosystems and that sort of thing. And when they're ask to list some words that are unnatural, they often list like concrete and plastic and things that are created by and for human beings. And so I think in our everyday sort of rhetorically when we think of nature, we do think of it as being separate from humanity. And despite wanting to sort of always be a part of nature, I do think that we have kind of separated ourselves from nature at least in sort of everyday understanding of the usage of the term. And I argue in my practice, in my work, in this talk, in everything that I do as a climate scientist that we need to re-imagine our future as one where humanity and nature truly do co-exist where we are actually a part of nature and material part of nature. And to do this, we need to redefine the boundaries between what is natural and what is unnatural. And also keep in mind that unfortunately, the most important nature story of our time is than it is the story of loss. So as we center ourselves with that and in that space, we can then forge a path forward and I'll argue that art and design are really critical tools that will help us get to the other side, so to speak. Obviously, this isn't a really terribly new and novel thinking, although it's in my estimation really underdeveloped an underexplored but there has always sort of been a role for aesthetics in understanding our natural world. Here's an essay by Ronald Hepburn called the "Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty." And here's a really great quote from David George Haskell's essay called "Notes on Ecological Aesthetics and Ethics." And I'll just read it out loud. He says, "once we collectively have an integrated sense of aesthetics, we can begin to discern what is beautiful and what is about a place. And from there, I believe we can begin to form an objective or near objective foundation for ethical discernment. Answers emerge from the community of life itself, filtered through human experience and consciousness." I think that there's especially an important and especially important role for aesthetics when we look at sort of the ways in which Americans or people in general view scientists, right? And so I pulled a poll from the Pew Research Center from, I believe this was 2019 which showed that if you ask Americans like what they think about scientists, 89%, almost 90% of them consider scientists to be intelligent. So that's really wonderful, but only 54%, just a few more than 1/2 consider scientists to be good communicators, and about the same 43% consider them to be socially awkward. So those are not great traits. And there's a bit of a mismatch here between people viewing scientists as being very intelligent but not very good communicators, right? So there's obviously a space for art and design to improve the communication of science. And I think that this is typically when we think of collaborations between artists and scientists, we think about improving the communication of science. And I'll show you in this talk that my work takes it even a step further. One of the reasons why I think that art is really, really good and crucial for understanding the climate crisis and for thinking about the climate crisis is because climate change is, as philosopher Timothy Morton calls it in his book, "Hyperobjects," a hyperobject. A hyperobject is something that is so vast both spatially and temporally that our brains have a really difficult time grasping exactly kind of what it is. It's an object. We know it's an object, sort of, we know climate change is an object, but we have a difficult time understanding what that object actually is, right? As my student, Daniel Fromberg said in response to a quick question over time and space, "climate change is an incomprehensible concept." And while we all encounter abstractions in our work, scientists, philosophers, et cetera, artists and designers in particular intelligently address abstraction and create objects every day. And so it makes sense then that you would use aesthetics or there would be a role for aesthetics in communicating climate change. So now's the fun part of the talk. We're going to flip through some of the work that some of my students have done in my classes. Again, I teach Climate Change and Climate Science to Art students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And here's a final project that one of my students, Katie Wittenberg made which she titled "Climate Deniers on Vacation." And it's a really cool image, one of my favorite images. You can see some really notable climate deniers, the Koch Brothers, Scott Pruitt, Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil sitting on these polar bears, these charismatic megafauna as we call them, right? They're animals that are endangered because of climate change. They're also really relatable to us as humans. We can anthropomorphize them in a way that makes them sort of charismatic to us. And then in the background, the stylized mountain range is actually a line graph of the temperature record of a segment of the temperature, global temperature records showing climate change, showing global warming going from the sort of left side of the image to the right. Here's another example of some work that my students have made. On the left, we have a Climate Change Quilt made by my student, Micah Dillman. And in this quilt, they sort of talk about some of the intersectional identities and impacts of climate change like gender identity in the middle and class and race and geographical location and access to resources, right? And then some of the things that climate change is gonna do that will impact those and the network of how those interact like natural disasters and displacement and denial of aid and loss of resources, right? All of these things are considerations that intersect non-linearly when we think about the climate crisis. And then of course my student Micah, they made this as a quilt to kind of represent the greenhouse effect which I described in class as being akin to putting a blanket over the earth and kind of warming us up slowly due to all that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then on the right, some really cool project that my student Ken Buckingham made, a plastic water bottle that's actually made out of glass. And this is one of the Nestle plastic water bottles but my student made it out of glass and in the exact shape of the Nestle bottle, and then used the plastic from the Nestle bottle to create the koozie on atop of the bottle, of the glass bottle, kind of to drive home the frivolities of a plastic and our obsession with plastic and how that's contributing to the climate crisis as well. One more slide, because I think this is fun I love the work that my students do, on the left by my student, Mandi, we have a Snapchat rant. So she used Snapchat to kind of rant about dangers of global warming and why it's so important and something that we really need to address as soon as we can. And then on the right, there's a video by my student, Ola, they made a cake out of seeds and other ingredients that an endangered species of bird that lives along the Chicago coastline consumes. It's good for the bird. And my student put this cake out along the Chicago shoreline in the bird sanctuary. We have a bird sanctuary on the North Side of Chicago where I live and teach. And then my student filmed the cake being consumed over the course of the day by the birds. And as the video goes along, there's a lot of sort of facts and information about both the bird and climate change in the intersection of the two. So it was still a very visceral sort of performance and video experience. So I do while I do I think that, so I'm shifting gears a little bit here, while I do think that art and design are really, really important and effective ways of communicating the danger of the climate crisis, I actually believe that climate change and climate science and the climate crisis itself are so urgent. And the situation is so dire that we actually have to take everything one step further, right? We can't just be communicating climate change and communicating climate science. We actually have to be doing better science. And here's where I think art and design actually can help improve not just the communication of science but also the production of scientific knowledge. Right, so art and science, these collaborations, what I call radical collaborations can improve science and not just communication. So I'm actually going to skip ahead. Here is a little out of order. I've got this graphic here, which is sort of the meat of my hypothesis, right? So in grade school, we learn about the scientific method. And I know that the scientific method isn't really this totally linear process, but in general, right, a scientific endeavor that the production of scientific knowledge begins with some sort of hypothesization, some hypothesis questioning, proposing, imagining exploring. Then it moves to an experimentation phase where you're measuring and you're researching and you're analyzing the data and you're making graphs and you're coming to conclusions, hopefully, excuse me. And then finally, we have a conclusion and possibly if your conclusions are really good at theory where you're publishing your work and you're discussing it and you're presenting it. And I had the incredible opportunity two summers ago to work with a design team where I learned about the design process. And the design process, in my mind as a scientist, is really analogous to the scientific method where you have ideation analogous to hypothesizing, prototyping analogous to experimentation, and then refinement which is analogous to concluding and theorizing. But prior all of this in the design method or in the designing process, there is an understanding phase where designers talk and listen and learn from an empathize with actual human beings. And I think that this is often something that scientists could do more of actually because as I will show, we did this, right? We kind of walked through this process as both scientists and designers and we found that by incorporating this understanding phase, this empathizing phase, human-centering the process, not only can design help improve the aesthetics of let's say science, but it can also actually improve the knowledge that's produced. And so I'm just going to go back here. In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to collaborate with some designers and other climate scientists to redesign a data delivery interface. And so just briefly, we used data from this satellite instrument called MISR which flies pole-to-pole over around the planet and taking pictures, right, taking... It's a spectral radiometer so it takes, it's a passive instrument and kind of you can see clouds, you can see smoke above the air surface, all of this stuff. And we combined those data with a software program that I helped work on and design and produce many years ago during my time working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory that measures the height of smoke that's emitted from fires over the earth surface. So here's an image from the software showing the satellite image from MISR of smoke streaming off the tops of these large fires that occurred in the Wine Country of Northern California a couple of years ago, right? You can see the San Francisco Bay is in here. So these are the Wine Country fires. And then when we run our algorithm from this program, we get the height of that smoke above the surface. And we've done this for about 50,000 fires across the globe. And we've created this MISR Plume High Project where you have the plume heights from thousands and thousands of fires across the planet. For four years, I believe, or four or five years now, we're up to really valuable dataset for climate scientists to kind of assess the impact of fire on the climate and how climate change is changing all of that. The problem is that this is the website. This is the data delivery website that you use to that you previously would use to obtain these data. And as you can see, it is really bad. It's really confusing. And it just, it doesn't work. And so this data set was really underutilized. And so we collaborated with some designers to redesign this data interface and I'm going to walk you through that process now. And hopefully at the end, you'll understand what I'm saying about this combination of the design process, the human-centered design process and the scientific method. So when we began this project, we began with the understanding phase, right? The human-centered contextual inquiry, as my coauthor and colleague Adrian Galvin who is the main designer on this project calls it, the Contextual Inquiry Phase where you're understanding the people and the problem. Contextual inquiry, as described by Adrian, is a design technique in which people are studied and communicated with in our context of action in order to build a clear understanding of what they need, right? So in this project, this entailed multiple sessions, discussions and workflow demonstrations as well as sketching. So sketching is a low cost, really effective method of engaging with this contextual inquiry or understanding sort of phase. So here, I just love showing some of Adrian's sketches because I think he's just a really talented drawer. So sketching, right? So ideation sketching is low cost and intuitive way to iterate on ideas and create artifacts that the team can have and can respond to and create conversations around. So here's some more sketches, some more of Adrian's sketches. And of course, throughout all of these processes, there's just intense collaboration and co-designing with scientists, right? So showing the sketches and sharing the ideas with the climate scientists gave the designers a clear idea of what they should do. And it also helped the scientists articulate what exactly they needed from these data, why they needed these data, why these data were important, what types of tools and methodologies would be useful for improving the way that they conduct their own research. So once we did the sketching, Adrian moved to a prototyping phase using paper first. So here's some examples of the of the paper prototype and then the testing and then a digital prototype, which we created with some software designers back to a paper prototype, more testing, another final digital prototype, and then finally, we've got the results. And so I'm going to show you the results. And I personally was floored when I saw the results that the design team came up with. And was really the catalyst for me kind of becoming a, what we might call a true believer in this methodology. So, again, to remind you, this was the data delivery interface before we began this project and now this is the data delivery interface. And so you can see that this image I have no idea what's going on. I have no idea what these data are, where these data are, how they're organized, what I'm going to find in these data, what's possible, what possible science questions I can ask of these data. Now right after working through the design process with the design team and creating this interface, not only is it aesthetic but it also gives me a lot of information. So here I have a map of of Africa and the bars represent the locations of all of the fire plumes from these datasets, and then the height of the plume, the height of the bar, sorry, is the strength of the fire, the fire ready to power, as we call it, how strong the fire is. And then the color represents how high in the atmosphere the plume was going. And so you can see there's a loose correlation between strength of the fire and height of the plume, but not always. And so that's actually a really important conclusion that I can come to as a scientist without having to do any sort of downloading of data, parsing data using some computer language that I've got to learn, right? They don't teach you Python necessarily when you're training to become a climate scientist. That's something that we learn extra add-on to make sense of these data. And so what this interface does is it eliminates some of that redundancy. It eliminates some of those steps. There's another possible screen that you can have as your kind of home screen when you open this website would shows an X, Y plot of different variables that are contained in this data set, right? So on the left here, we've got the plume height and then on the right, you have the fire ready to power. So kind of showing this but in a two dimensional X, Y platform, and you can see, again, there is really no relationship. There's a loose relationship, but really nothing. And this is actually an important conclusion that I can come to without ever having to spend a ton of time trying to understand like how to work with the data, right? So improving the aesthetics and walking through the design process actually helped improve the science that can be conducted now using this new interface. We can also change the underlying map to a Google Map type situation. We can change the colors of the dots which all represent the fire plumes, right? These are all individual smoke plumes from these wildfires and the colors here, the different colors here represent the different types of biomes, the different types of ecosystems. And so I can get a really good understanding, right? Like in Mexico, for example, fire plumes along the West Coast all seem to be kind of contained within a particular type of ecosystem which is very different than the fires in Guatemala. And so therefore, then I can ask the science question, well, maybe the plumes in Guatemala behave differently and therefore have different impacts on the climate. And so we took this also, the interface is dynamic. So as you scroll in and out, the aesthetics change, the ratio changes kind of with respect to the size of the image. So we took all this work that we did and we finally ended up in a manuscript which is in review currently with an academic journal. And it's all a part of the theme of this work which is sort of Reimagining the Future, collaborations between artists and designers and scientists as a roadmap to solving the climate crisis. And so I'm hoping that this hypothesis and this integration of the design process with scientific method can become more actualized in the real world and lead to better science. And so we conducted a few controlled environments studies just to see whether our hypothesis even made any sense. And so in this image, I'm showing an insight process map that Adrian made where he watched us scientists, the climate scientists, interact with the new interface, interact with the new data delivery interface that we designed together. And he kind of color-coded it when the scientist adjusted the interface or made a new observation, kind of like I was just doing in real time during this recording. And then each of the red bars is a new hypothesis that the scientist arrived at. And so one of our sort of conclusions to this very simple controlled environment study is that the improvement in the interface and the delivery system improved the number and the robustness of the hypotheses and insights that the scientists arrived at. And in order to sort of validate this with the real world, we asked the scientists to describe the steps and the research process that they used to conduct their most important paper. And so, as we move forward with this work, we want to revisit the initial drivers and see if introducing a human component, as I've been arguing for the last 20 minutes, to scientific scientific inquiry especially in climate science is a must to arriving at better insights, better science and ultimately solutions to the climate crisis. And so I like to leave you with this slide. I'm an eternal optimist. And I think that I think that in order to solve the climate crisis, we can't be pessimistic. There's no space or room for pessimism. And so I just want to leave you with some thoughts to kind of tie up this work and this talk. This isn't the end of the world. It's simply the end of this world, this world that we live in currently with the climate crisis and other various issues and we currently have a radical and revolutionary opportunity to make the next world a better, brighter, more equitable one. But if we don't first imagine the future that we want, right? Then we will never have the future that we deserve. And in order to imagine this future, and in order to arrive at this future, we must incorporate these diverse voices, artists, queer people. I'm a queer person myself, right? And I think that bringing these voices together and radical collaboration, talking to each other is the way that we will get to the next world, the world that we deserve in the world that we need. So thank you for listening, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think of this work and whether you think this is something that is actually feasible. Thanks.

- Up next, we'll tune into a conversation with the bio acoustician, Bernie Krause. Bernie's career as a musician is extensive and fascinating, ranging from collaborating with members of the Beatles to being an early adopter of the Moog Synthesizer, and so much more. In 1968, he established Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes. And since 1979, his work has primarily focused on capturing the sounds of the natural world and creating eco soundscapes. In this conversation, we'll learn about Bernie's process in recording the natural world. We'll hear about the language that he uses to describe his unique work and learn about how he has seen environments change over the years he's been listening. He's joined in conversation by Liz Kiem, a Curator of Arts and Cinema at the Exploratorium. So here's Bernie and Liz.

- Hello, my name is Liz and I'm here this evening in conversation with Bernie Krause. Really looking forward to this. Bernie, I know you were born in Detroit and at an early age became a studio musician working at Motown Studios. How cool is that? And then you headed to New York City and became a part of the very popular group at the time, the Weavers. From there, you went to Los Angeles in the mid 60s with your friend, Paul Beaver, the avant-garde jazz musician and became the West Coast representatives for the Moog Synthesizer. You were also working in Hollywood when Rock and Roll was in its heyday and began working with the Doors, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Stones, and then also because you were in Hollywood and doing so much amazing sound composition, you worked on some of the major films, including "Apocalypse Now" and created those iconic helicopter sounds. And then from there, you came to the Bay Area to work at Mills College or not work at Mills College but to study Sound Composition there. Mills was very known in the avant-garde world in terms of music composition. And I'm wondering, with all this experience that you've had, when you let go of the kind of musical instruments you were working with and then let the environment become the instrument because we know you spent the latter 1/2 of your life immersed in exploring sounds from the environment. So what was that? Was it a organic kind of quiet transition or was there something that happened that really turned you around in a minute to this field of work?

- Well, there were a couple of events that occurred at the same time. First of all, I suffer from a terrible case of ADHD. And I found that the only thing that kind of mitigated those feelings was the sound of the natural world. And I got to that from a strange perspective because Paul Beaver and I had an album to do for Warner Brothers in 1968. It was called "In a Wild Sanctuary." And it was the first album on the theme of ecology which we knew nothing about when we started. And it was also the first to ever incorporate natural soundscapes as a component of orchestration into the context of the music. So it required of us, it demanded of us actually that we go into the field and record these natural sounds for the first time. As it happened in the late 1960s, the technology was just about to change from manorial to stereo. And we got ahold of one of the first stereo recorders, portable recorders which a manufacturer had given to us to beta test. And we took it out. And I took this new device out into the field and turned on the recorder and began to listen to these sounds. And it was like, I was 30 years old at the time and I had no idea what I was doing because we had no mentors and there were no archives of sound that were available to us. We had to do it all ourselves. So luckily, Paul wasn't keen to do this. So he left the test to me, marched off into the field, what I thought was pretty wild place which is called Muir Woods. Muir Woods is just North of San Francisco. It's practically within walking distance of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. And I found what I thought would be a good spot. So I cranked up one of the first recorders that we had and hearing the acoustics of that outdoor space located in that small stand of redwoods on that late October afternoon in 1968 was most, it was one of the most intensely charged experiences I've ever had as a recordist. And it was as if I was struck by one of those visions I'd read about. It had a pacifying effect on that terrible ADHD fear and tension that I'd been feeling because I was alone in this forest which I thought at the time was wild. But that moment prompted me to dedicate my life to that moderating pursuit for however long I would be physically able to do this. And here I am, we're having this discussion.

- Well, you are often described now as a bioacoustician, bioacoustician. That's not easy word for me, but I was wondering what that means because I also know that you coined the phrase soundscape ecology.

- Yeah.

- Then there are these other words like the geophony. I think that's how you pronounce it or the biophony and anthro-

- Anthropophony. Think of anthropology.

- So this is just a whole new field that you've really kind of instigated and nurtured. And can you talk a little bit more about what those terms mean?

- Well, sure. The first term that you're talking about bioacoustics, and I consider myself to be a bioacoustician, bio means, it's very simple. Bio means life and acoustics is sound. So it's the sound of living organisms, sound produced by living organisms. All this stuff has some kind of history behind it. When the Canadian composer Murray Schafer coined the term soundscape in his 1977 book, "The Tuning of the world," he meant by that all of the sounds that reach our human ear from whatever source. And the problem is that Schafer neglected to identify the sources. So by the 1990s, when I began to write about these experiences in the natural world, I often found myself searching for terms to describe not only what I was hearing but how I was experiencing the sounds of the wild. And in 1998, I introduced the term biophony which is the collective sound produced by all organisms in a given habitat at one moment in time. And I introduced it in my book "Into a Wild Sanctuary" that I'd done for Heyday Press in Berkeley. In 2002 after completing the first study of biophony as a measure of habitat health in Sequoia National Park which is just South of Yosemite, by the way, most people don't even know about that place. And I was working with my colleague, my late colleague and friend Stuart Gage who's emeritus from Michigan State University, it became clear that we needed to at least include a couple of more terms to round out the larger classifications of the soundscape. So we added geophony, geo meaning earth. And these are the non-biological sounds that are produced from the effects of wind blowing through the leaves or grasses, water flowing in a stream, for example, waves at the ocean shore and the movement of the earth. And finally, there was anthropophony. If you think that's a hard one to say, then just think of anthropology. Everybody can say anthropology, okay? And this is human generated sound. This has two categories, and or two subcategories, let's call them. One is controlled sound like music, theater, and language. And the other is chaotic and incoherent sounds, sounds that don't have any reference or any real noise, any real information to them. And we refer to those as noise because they're always interfering with the other sounds that we need to hear. And then I know Ted is gonna kill me on this but you're the first to hear my new name for citizen scientists and new learners actively interested in this field. Are you ready?

- Aha.

- It's biophoneers.

- Biophoneers, oh, I love this.

- Okay, now we get down to the another phrase, the acoustic niche hypothesis. This is really important because it's a biophonic expression that defines the relative health of subtropical or tropical habitats, and even a few tempered ones. And these warm biomes as we get closer to the equator, either from the North or the South, the density and diversity of wildlife is apt to increase as each focal species flies for acoustic or temporal bandwidth in order to avoid transmission and reception masking noises and masking issues. Am I making myself clear? Do you understand what I mean by that?

- Mh-hm.

- Okay, so these phenomena are revealed in graphic illustrations of sound called spectrograms. And so we have a way of seeing sound now that we didn't before which is really remarkable and terrific. So when a habitat is viable, the traces of creature vocalizations establishing the acoustic bandwidth tend to be as clearly defined as the notes on a page of an orchestral musical score. That's so cool. And this is the acoustic niche hypothesis that many of us have worked on and developed over the last 20 years in particular.

- That takes me to my next question because I know that your work serves both the arts and this unique scientific research that you're doing, and you use, in many ways, a kind of scientific method. And that is that you're very careful in the way that you want to set kind of a basic data platform so that you're recording as you, you're trying not to disturb the field that you're doing your research in but yet here you are entering it. So what's your intentionality? How do you go in and do kind of the least disturbance that you can in order to really get a true recording or reading of that environment? What are your methods?

- Well, first of all, I'm trying to record for two purposes. One is for scientific evaluation of these habitats through soundscape and the biophony. And the other is because I know that if I want to get this information across to large groups of people, I'm going to have to somehow transform that data into something accessible to others. And so that is in the fine arts. And I do this through these installations that I do for museums and aquaria. And it's really important to know that in order to make this happen, I've had to use very high-end gear in the field, not only in the field, but also in the studio and in the lab and making because I've also I worked at a time when we were making the transition between from analog to digital formats, that was an interesting moment but it was also fairly easy. These days I record with a Sound Devices 700 Series because it's a really great recorder and also because I'm having a little trouble seeing these days, I can see the screen on the recorder because it's large enough to be able to read all of the information on it. So that's one of the reasons that I use it but also it's a terrific machine. They're no longer made, by the way, but that series was one of the best. And it was made during the early aughts into about 02, about three or four years ago. So I have one of those, and the microphone system that I use is called an MS system. It's not technically stereo like you put nose-to-nose microphone, it's a different kind of system that gives you a much more robust result, not only for information for analysis because the thing is very carefully caliber, all of the work is very carefully calibrated but also for the recordings and playback in large public spaces and also for any kind of art piece that I want to do whether it's a CD or an album or an installation. So it's really important to have really good materials. So this quality protocol, it allows me to calibrate my equipment to very precise standards. So it my field data is analytically dependable, while at the same time I'm providing the best possible quality if I decide to transform this field data into works of 3D or surround installation art for presentation in public spaces. So it's really important to keep those two things in mind and they can both be done at the same time. But I didn't, to learn from , I really didn't fully appreciate the depth of my archive scientific value until the 1990s. And that was when I returned occasionally to sites that I'd previously recorded and either found changes in the biophony or none with any statistical significance. These are really important things to consider. In most places, I just recorded only a few times. So I didn't have a chance to go back and it's very expensive to do these trips, by the way. And I wasn't getting any support from any institution. So we live in Sonoma Valley and it's an agricultural area bounded by semi-forests and mountain ridges, both to the East and the West. And since 1993, I've been recording annually in the Mayacamas Mountains that separate Napa and Sonoma Valleys a place called Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. And it's an easily accessible site where I can record and be relatively assured of capturing dawn choruses, for instance, with little or no human noise interfering. And by the way, a dawn chorus is that time just before sunrise till a few minutes after sunrise when the bird vocal activity is usually at its best and highest. And from Sugarloaf, I've got some pretty dramatic examples of biophonic shifts due to climate change now, particularly as a consequence of the Northern California fires and drought this past decade. So it's really key information that tells us, that has a great narrative behind it, beyond what we usually write about. It's really cool.

- Yeah, thinking about how you would revisit Sugarloaf Ridge over these many years, did your practice change just in terms of your own kind of internal way of working? I was thinking about how you have to be so quiet. And I also heard in a previous interview how you talked about how long, how many hours you might be in one environment in particular, and you might be there for 10 hours. Do you do like a meditative practice? How is that that you managed to keep yourself so still? What's your discipline there?

- Well, again, I learned over time and actually recording taught me this. Because of my ADHD, I have a tendency to be very nervous and move around a lot and get distracted. That's really a key component to the disorder. So that's really a key component to this disorder. So one of the things that recording taught me when I first started to record, I could only record like for one minute and sit still for one minute at a time. And gradually, I got to two minutes and then five minutes and then 10 and then finally, I could do a whole reel of tape which was 22 minutes for a seven inch reel of tape. And that was remarkable to me that I could sit that long, that quietly and not disturb other creatures. I found also the being still dealt with the issue of disturbing other creatures in the field of sound. So I didn't want to frighten them away. So I would sit like 100 meters away. And so I could see my microphone and see the behavior around it but I wasn't interfering with that sonic field.

- Great.

- And that seemed to work. It seemed make a big difference. And in response to your earlier question, I was very careful not to disturb other creatures. For instance, when I do the dawn chorus certainly at Sugarloaf, I always get there 20 minutes before things start to happen. So it's still very quiet. There's almost no noise there at all, except the geophonic noise like just water in a stream nearby. So I do it once, very quiet. I get there before anybody's awake, I set up my microphone and I move away and I let things unfold and they're going to unfold as they're going to unfold in their own way. The natural world is always, it's always testing for optimum performance and that's why things never occur the same way twice in the sonic world. So you'll never hear the bird coming out of the same tree or the same place on the ground. They're always testing for optimum performance and they never reach it, of course, because it's a goal that's unattainable, but that's one of the neat things about the discoveries that we've made.

- Thinking about optimum performance, I think this is a good time to think about or to discuss the great animal orchestra which is really kind of a culmination of this amazing 1/2 century work that you've been doing. Would you like to describe it a bit for us what this work is? We know that it's been shown in Europe to thousands and thousands of people and has been beautifully received. It's an incredibly relevant work, so.

- You're talking about the Cartier piece, right?

- Yes, the Fondation Cartier's the "Great Animal Orchestra."

- Yeah, okay. Well, there's a fellow by the name of, he's an anthropologist by the name of Bruce Albert. Bruce Albert has been studying the Yanomami Tribe which is a forest dwelling tribe from Northern Brazil. And he'd read a copy of the "Great Animal Orchestra" when it was translated into French. And he sent it to his good friend and colleague, Herve Chandes, who's Director of the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which you just mentioned. And Herve in turn contacted me in 2014, I guess it was after a few exchanges by emails and phone. He flew to California to hear what I had in the sound archive and to see if there were enough elements to create an exhibit. Well, I gave Herve about 15 or 16 examples of different habitats, both marine and terrestrial from which he chose seven. And I conformed those recordings into 12 minute programs to be performed in 5.1 surround audio with synchronized streaming spectrograms in a large screen formats recording the soundscapes. What's interesting about this is that typically the way that sound has been thought of in the industry and in the world in general is as a kind of support thing for the visual because we're a very visual culture. So sound is always the last thing that's ever done in film, right? Well, what we did is we just turned that whole thing around, that whole idea around. It was sound led and it was the visual that was supporting the sound because again, we can see sound down for the first time. So the projection designs were created and executed by Matt Clark, United Visual Artists, UVA, in London. And the 90 minute show that resulted is a self-explanatory piece across all ages, all cultures, all genders and with minimal narratives, there's almost nothing to describe it because it's so self-explanatory when you see and hear the piece, and by the way, I hear you're going to have that at the Exploratorium.

- We certainly hope so. In terms of the "Great Animal Orchestra," I was also wondering because you recorded in landscapes over the course of years and have revisited them, have you, in terms of habitats, have you found like just critical changes, has there been a habitat in particular, kazoo-type, that you went back to and found it to be almost completely different like nowhere near what you had experienced before or has it really been a kind of gradual change over some of the habitats that you've recorded in?

- Well, that's a really interesting question, but let me kind of frame it a little bit differently. There are very few examples in my archive that directly speak to climate change with an AB comparison. Actually, I only have only three of them. During my first several years in the field, I was primarily there for therapeutic reasons 'cause it just made me feel better. So the biophonies were what helped stem the effects of the ADHD. At the same time, I needed to find a way to make a living to pay for these wide ranging field trips and the support personnel at the various sites. So my secondary reason was to gather the kinds of audio that would work in public space, sound installations at venues like natural history museums, zoos, aquaria, that kind of thing and environmental theme parks that supported soundscapes as a component of their visitor experience. But it was an afterthought for those people. Most of the time, just an afterthought, well, let's throw some sound at it. Everything will be okay. So it was very late in my career that I realized an inadvertent collection of comparisons over time. One of those three was a climate change indication from around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that included, by the way, one of the first digital audio recordings of biophonics because Sony had given me a very large and cumbersome device to record in 1981. And I went to Jackson Hole and recorded, the first place I ever recorded and shut it out and turned it on, was in a natural habitat just North of Jackson Hole. So it's the first digital recording of a natural habitat that exists. Well, and then the second thing was a coral reef and Fiji that featured both living and a dying component. So it was a 400 meter long reef, a 1/4 mile long reef. And part of it was living and part of it was dying. So I was able to record on the same day the living part and the dying part and get a comparison between the two because we weren't going to go back to Fiji anytime soon. And the third was located at Sugarloaf State Park that I mentioned earlier. So Sugarloaf, I've been recording there since 1993 and I have a really good record of changes over time. And I'm going out there this Thursday and I'm going to go again on April 15th which is a typical day that I record there. So I guess the biggest surprise is that climate change has happened so rapidly and that shift is reflected so clearly in the biophony. I guess that's the thing that's most surprising to me. For example, in our temperate region, spring now occurs two weeks earlier than it did in the 1990s and the hot season lasts longer. So we've got those things to deal with, and we're dealing with it all the time particularly with the fires, excuse me, particularly with the fires now. When our human bodies are... The neat comparison is, think of our human bodies. When we have a cold or we're sick, it really shows in our voice. And it's the same thing in the natural world when it's healthy, it sounds healthy. And when it's stressed, you can really tell the difference because of the way the animals are vocalizing in relationship to one another. So there are some key things that are important with regard to this work and how it unfolds and what it's telling us.

- I'm also wondering, in terms of this kind of incredible oral world that you've immersed yourself in if there was ever an experience that was a sound that was so unique and kind of out of the ordinary and something that you hadn't heard before, and you haven't heard since. Have you experienced something like that?

- Yeah, people ask me that a lot. It's not just one thing, I'm simply drawn to all kinds of different soundscapes in much the same way I like many different types of music. I just liked them at different times. So I'm trying to, you try balance that one out. For instance, I love what the textures of certain sounds do for me. So I'm kind of drawn to them and since I've become more physically constrained activity-wise, now I'm 82 years old, I'm mostly attracted to the recorded sounds of healthy habitats because their continence and resonance, it cheers me up. And it obliges me to want to engage with some kind of response. On any given day, my favorite habitat might be, geez, a tropical rainforest in Borneo or Sumatra or the Central African Republic in Africa or the Ecuadorian Amazon. I don't know where the Central African Republic would be if it wasn't an Africa. Anyway, on another, it might be the delicate sonic fabric of the Beaufort Lagoon up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the Northeast corner of Alaska. Next week, who knows, it might be springtime in Algonquin Park, Ontario with packs of singing wolves competing with a rich sound of the birds in the spring. And I've reached the time in my life when I swing my tired and failing legs over the side of the bed each day, if I'm fortunate enough to obtain the vertical, I ask myself, now what? And every moment, springs from that question.

- Oh, that's such a good question, Bernie. At the Exploratorium, we're known as a museum of science, art, and human perception. And we key in on the perception. We think of ourselves as very keen and careful observers. And you have, in some ways, brought careful listening into our lives and in this very deep and careful listening, we can think about what our relationship is to this world that surrounds us in renewed and very kind of cherished ways. And so I just want to thank you for the richness that you have given us in terms of paying attention to something that we might not normally pay attention to. I know for myself here in this urban environment and here we are you in this year of the pandemic where we've been sheltering in place. And I had no idea that my little slice of urban backyard was so rich with bird sound and bird activity. And it's been a gift. In terms of all the hardships we've experienced, it's been a real gift. And some of that is very much come from you and from what I've learned in terms of this very careful or careful listening and what it can teach us and how it can open the world to us. So I thank you so much, it's just a pleasure getting to know you.

- Thank you, Liz. Thank you.