This one comes from the bizarro side of art-science with no other purpose than looking cool: an artist actually managed to ‘play’ slices of tree trunks just like vinyl…. or close to this! You can imagine this actually needed much more work than slicing a tree and putting it on a turntable.
Bartholomaüs Traubeck has found a way to make music with a sophisticated euquipment I don’t understand at all, but that’s not the point. Using a PlayStation Eye Camera, something that may look like this, and a stepper motor attached to its control arm, data were collected from a tree slice and sent to a computer. Then a program called Ableton Live used the data to create a piano track, which varied depending on the tree’s structure? softness? According to the artist’s website, the tree rings were actually analyzed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth… and this ended up making music… So the apparatus you see above is actually misleading because this is not a real turntable of course and there was all this computerized stuff to produce music. However, the data acquired from the piece of wood interpreted the program differently, even though the music was already in there.
Thus, the poetry of the whole thing laid in the use of trees, but I guess you could put a slice of anything up there and produce some sound, right? What about the pancake or the pizza you cooked this morning? it could work!
So how does it sound? The tracks are weird and eerie, but absolutely not inaudible, with squalls of piano notes and long pauses, they have some gravitas but overall they leave me rather cold, like some random concerto produced by a chaotic and meaningless universe. Bartholomäus Traubeck has actually posted a whole album on bandcamp with the interpretations of different trees: Spruce, Ash, Oak, Maple, Alder, Walnut and Beech and the sounds are truly different, but all in the sinister range…. Some of them seem to accelerate or at least be more agitated toward the end of the track, but none of them are even close to have produced a few notes of any of Beethoven’s symphonies or even an hummable line of the simplest pop song… On the other hand, this could totally compete with anything Stockhausen has composed, and I am saying this without even knowing much about Stockhausen.
