Trick question: Before recordings, before electronics, even before history, what was the original form of ambient music? Here’s a hint: it’s not what we normally call music, but it has a lot in common with music.

​The answer is the natural soundscape: a combination of the geophony—non-biological natural sounds like wind, waves, water, and weather, and the biophony—the sounds produced by all the non-human organisms in a given habitat.

​Documenting the natural soundscape has been the life work of “soundscape ecologist” BERNIE KRAUSE, who’s been recording and archiving natural soundscapes from around the world since 1979. Our 3-D sound localization ability is based on the evolutionary advantage of being able to identify the location, direction, and distance of ambient sounds—and it’s this sensibility we use when we listen to ambient music.

On this transmission of HEARTS of SPACE, the magical combination of ambient nature sounds and ambient music...on a program called WILD SANCTUARY.

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