Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists (UVA) The Great Animal Orchestra

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain are proud to announce a seven-week extension of the North American premiere of The Great Animal Orchestra, a collaborative work between pioneer soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Due to the overwhelming popularity, the exhibition will remain on view at PEM through July 10, 2022.

Step into an immersive audiovisual experience that celebrates our planet’s rich biodiversity. Over the course of nearly fifty years, Bernie Krause collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural environments, including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from around the world.

Trained as a musician, Krause found animal vocalizations in the natural world to be akin to musical harmony and orchestral organization. Krause’s soundscapes reveal that within any ecosystem, each species has its own acoustic niche and human activities are increasingly silencing these great animal orchestras. United Visual Artists (UVA) worked with Krause to visualize these recordings as animated spectrograms, which immerse us in the heart of these wild soundscapes. This unique installation makes a plea for preserving the wondrous diversity of the animal world.

The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists was commissioned in 2016 by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and is now part of its collection.