Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg has written Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful, and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than thirty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. Nightingales in Berlin is his latest book and film. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Scott McVay was Founding Executive Director of both the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, where he led efforts in strategic grant-making in education (K-12), the arts, critical issues, and the welfare of animals. McVay wrote an article for Scientific American in 1966 that became a baseline document for whale conservation, and he served on the US delegation to the International Whaling Commission during the years when it began to protect whales and not just kill and count them. He discovered and documented that Humpback whales sing long, elegant, and complex songs and, together with Roger Payne, published their findings in a cover article in the journal Science in 1971.