The Sounds of Trees

If you've ever wonder if a tree could make music, it can and it sounds beautiful yet haunting. In the video below a record player was modified to play slices of wood. The year rings on the wood were analyzed and then translated into music.

A tree’s year rings are analyzed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music based on the year ring data. Those are analyzed for their thickness and growth rate and are then mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this rule set very differently.

It's intriguing that each note is a season passed in the life of the tree. The smaller intervals on the wood were harder years for the tree and the longer silences filled with seasons of growth. So really when you listen to the wood record you're listening to the whole life of the tree.