The New Yorker

Masha Karpoukhina’s documentary follows a soundscape ecologist who lost everything in a California wildfire.

For Bernie Krause, the sign of a healthy ecosystem is the sound it makes. The musician and Hollywood sound engineer is a pioneer of soundscape ecology, a field that uses audio recordings to better understand the natural world. The noises of all the organisms living together in a particular place—the trill of birdsong, thrum of insect wings, rustle of leaves, cacophony of yips, or a lonely midnight howl—make up that setting’s biophony, an audio signature of life. For decades, Krause has recorded biophonies from around the planet, and he noticed an overriding trend: the natural world is going quiet. As habitats and species are lost to climate change, their voices disappear. “The Last of the Nightingales,” a documentary by Masha Karpoukhina, tells the story of this loss through Krause’s firsthand stories and deep archive of recordings.

Film by Masha Karpoukhina