Run don't walk to experience The Great Animal Orchestra at the Exploratorium right now, a gorgeous installation that melds the amazing field recordings Bernie Krause has been archiving for the last 50+ years with a mesmerizing visualization of the sounds you are hearing. Divided into segments that range around the world and under our oceans, the Orchestra shows you the waveforms wildlife create in a continually-scrolling spectrogram. It is sheer pleasure to immerse yourself in the sounds of the natural world (the howling coyotes in one segment brought tears of happiness to my eyes), but Krause is also intent on showing what happens when we don't protect these habitats and allow them to succumb to drought, to logging, to bleaching, as in the sobering "Before/After" segment that opens the entire piece. If you prefer your Exploratorium with only adults and no kids you can attend one of their Thursday evening After Dark sessions, as my friends and I did last night, and in our case we were also able to catch an incredible talk by Krause and Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington. They reflected on their personal histories with sound and mused about the importance of listening, and above all emphasized how we need to preserve biodiversity and reverse the damage we've done.
Masking? A smattering of masks, which is probably just where we're going to be from here on out.