Whether or not you know the name Bernie Krause, you definitely know his work. Before his name was spoken in the same breath as Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey, Krause was a musician in the more traditional sense of the term. Starting out early in life playing and composing music for stringed instruments, he turned to guitar in the ’60s, working as a Motown session guitarist, and ultimately a recording engineer and producer. His curiosity around advancements in electronic music eventually led him to the Bay Area to study at Tape Music Center at Mills College. It was around this time that he met his late musical partner, Paul Beaver, forming Beaver & Krause, one of the first groups to record commercial electronica, infusing the sounds of modular analog synths into popular music. In fact, Krause, an early pioneer of the Moog synthesizer, is widely credited for electronic music’s most notable firsts, and is responsible for introducing the synth to artists like Brian Eno, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors.

Along with working with some of the world’s biggest musical acts, he’s also known for his original scores for 135 films, including “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Apocalypse Now,” the latter being his final project in Hollywood. This was before a life-changing experience altered the course of his future.

It was not his compositions for film that led him to leave the traditional world of music for natural soundscapes, but a record he made in 1970 called “In a Wild Sanctuary,” inspired by his and Beaver’s then newfound passion for ecology and ambient sound. It was during a moment in a local San Francisco redwood park, while trying to capture audio for this record, that Krause had the epiphany: “The immediate impact of the sound field, when I switched on the recorder and heard the acoustic impression of that magical place and moment with its illusion of space and depth, jolted me to make the decision, then and there, to find a way to seek out animal-rich or tranquil places to record for whatever remained of my life.”

Through his work, using the synthesizer as a transitional vehicle to explore other influences, Krause eventually came to understand the impact of that first natural sound-recording experience. He recalls it as such: “That moment was also my first realization that, at some point in the future, I’d have another musical mentor — the rich, unlimited, and challenging soundscapes of the natural world.” Not long after, Krause enrolled at Union Institute to get his PhD in bioacoustics. And the rest was history.

Fortuitously, at the time of their catastrophic loss they’d already partnered with Fondation Cartier on a globetrotting exhibition of Krause’s work, including a backup archive containing the core of Krause’s digital field recordings. From the remnants of these sound files, “The Great Animal Orchestra” was born, an interactive audio-visual experience. Utilizing Krause’s recordings to explore the world’s rich biodiversity in an immersive form, the heart of this installation is an alarming spectrogram, a visual representation of the soundscapes he’s recorded, fed through a computer highlighting the sounds of different animals within an environment — vocalizing their relationships to each other, asserting dominance, but also clearly displaying which habitats are greatly distressed. As Krause likes to say, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.”

The pictures we gleaned from the sound we eventually captured that morning were perplexing. Although nearly one-third of the park had recently recovered from the devastation the last fire had left behind, the dawn chorus was exactly as Krause had surmised. At around 6:29 a.m., after sitting in dead silence for over half an hour, we eventually heard an owl hooting, followed by more bouts of silence interrupted by random chirps from purple finches, pings from fruit bats, squawks from red tail hawks, croaks from ravens, frantic pecks of acorn woodpeckers, and a wild turkey very adamant that his presence become known. But aside from these short intervals of pre-sunrise sounds, we generally heard nothing beyond the peaceful trickling of water from a nearby stream, and the occasional gust of warm wind carrying the sweet smell of the thick morning air to our noses. We all knew this was not indicative of a truly healthy environment, and the recordings we heard later — compared to recordings made in the park years prior — made this abundantly clear. Still, we left the park feeling more hopeful than grim. Knowing that there are people like Krause, trying to teach the world how to listen to the song of life itself, one can only hope we find our way back in tune with the rest of the orchestra before the song is over.