Imagine if you could hear what chopped down trees have to say. What do you think they would say? Now, you don’t have to imagine. Try “Years”, the turntable that plays music from slices of wood.
Bartholomäus Traubeck, a German artist, has created a turntable that uses circular pieces of chopped trees instead of usual vinyl records and plays some beautiful music.
Traubeck says, “A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is 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 ruleset very differently.”
In short, each ring in a circular piece of wood, also used to calculate the age of a tree, are used to generate piano notes by the software in the turntable.
The music is rather sad, but hey, what else do you expect a chopped tree to sing?
Listen for yourself:
YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.
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