The Great Animal Orchestra

The Great Animal Orchestra is an immersive sound and light installation created by United Visual Artists (UVA) in collaboration with bioacoustician Bernie Krause, commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and first exhibited in 2016. The work draws on Krause's decades of field recordings capturing the acoustic signatures of ecosystems worldwide. UVA translated these biophonic soundscapes into a visual language of light: banks of vertical LED tubes respond in real time to the frequencies and rhythms of animal vocalizations, mapping spectrograms onto luminous columns that pulse, shimmer, and cascade across a darkened gallery.

At its core, the installation is both an artistic and ecological statement. Krause's recordings span habitats that are, in many cases, now degraded or silent — the orchestra of species that once filled these soundscapes has been diminished by deforestation, urbanization, and climate change. By giving these vanishing voices a monumental visual presence, UVA and Krause transform data into elegy, inviting audiences to perceive biodiversity not as an abstract statistic but as a living composition whose loss is felt viscerally. The work has toured internationally, including the Barbican in London.