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In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather than a chaotic cacophony of nighttime noises, it was as if each animal was singing within a defined acoustic bandwidth, like living instruments in a larger sylvan ensemble. 

Unsure of whether this structured musicality was real or the invention of an exhausted mind, Krause analyzed his soundscape recordings on a spectrogram when he returned home. Sure enough, the insects occupied one frequency niche, the frogs another, and the mammals a completely separate one. Each group had claimed a unique part of the larger sonic spectrum, a fact that not

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