A real-life carnival of the animals

By Philip Hoare

Paris, in July. I arrive on the Boulevard Raspail, and enter the glass-and-steel façade of the Fondation Cartier, designed by Jean Nouvel. It is surrounded by, and encloses, its own forest, a miniature park growing within the Fondation’s compound. Inside, the human cacophony of a summertime city is replaced by a simulacrum of the natural world. In the building’s blacked-out basement, you are plunged into an intoxicating experience. Here Bernie Krause, a musician, bioacoustician, veteran of the 1960s and pioneer of electronic music, has created a sound installation for the 21st century, an aural memorial to what we have lost, but also a celebration of what we still possess.

For over an hour, we are taken into seven environments around the world, from the Pacific Ocean to the Amazonas, from Zimbabwe to California. Visitors sit on cubes facing a darkened screen, at the foot of which runs a long shallow pool of still black water. The wall flickers into life as a floor-to-ceiling graph is projected along two sides of the vast room. To the left, vibrating lines indicate the sounds we are hearing; as they pass, they are translated into spectrograms, visual echoes of sonic evocations. The result is immersive, and salutary.