Abstract

Inside the wider field of biosemiotics, this paper gives attention to bioacoustics, the science that studies living beings through sound. Sound is conceived here both as an intra- and inter-specific mean of communication and a valuable indicator about ecosystems’ health. Analyzing ecosystems through the sonic dimension – that is essentially relational –, bioacoustics avoids to reduce the environment to a purely object and it represents a complex knowledge useful to answer to the Anthropocene ecological challenges. In specific, the Acoustic Niches Hypothesis by Bernie Krause and its musical metaphor can be read as a semiotic model useful to reintegrate the human animal inside the world of livings.