A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
biophony
The collective sound made by all the living things in one place at one time — not birdsong or frog chorus as separate items but the combined signature of a habitat, heard whole. It is one of three parts in the same scheme: geophony is the non-living sound of a place, wind and water and moving earth; anthropophony is everything people make.
Etymology
Greek bios, life, plus phōnē, sound or voice, coined by the American musician and soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who founded Wild Sanctuary in 1968 and has spent his working life recording habitats rather than species. He built the term because the existing vocabulary described animals making noise one at a time and had no word for the thing he was actually recording, which was an ensemble.