Listening to trees

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.

Troller Durden wrote:I like stuff like this.

It sounds amazing and beautiful, like a heavenly choir of opera singers. But is this merely a recording of crickets? As much as you’d like to believe that nature is exactly this beautiful to our own ears, that’s not quite the case. Here’s what really happened, as told by opera singer Bonnie Jo Hunt:

I had these messages saying that Robbie Robertson said to get in touch with me. So we went in studio. He said, `I want you to do whatever you feel like. And, now, these are crickets.’ So I thought, oh, my goodness. I’m to accompany crickets, see?

And when I heard them, I was so ashamed of myself, I was so humbled, because I had not given them enough respect. Jim Wilson recorded crickets in his back yard, and he brought it into the studio and went ahead and lowered the pitch and lowered the pitch and lowered the pitch. And they sound exactly like a well-trained church choir to me. And not only that, but it sounded to me like they were singing in the eight-tone scale. And so what–they started low, and then there was something like I would call, in musical terms, an interlude; and then another chorus part; and then an interval and another chorus. They kept going higher and higher.

They were saying cricket words. I kept thinking, `Oh, I almost can understand them. It’s a nice, mellow tone. And they never went off pitch until one of the interludes, where they went real crazy and they got back on again to where they were. And I know that people do not know that they’re listening to crickets unless they’re told that that’s what that is.

So yes, you are listening to two cricket tracks: crickets at normal speed (in Jim Wilson’s backyard), crickets slowed down with the pitch dropped (by Wilson and possibly Robbie Robertson), but it’s also accompanied by Bonnie Jo Hunt‘s beautiful, human singing. Still beautiful, still fascinating, but not just crickets alone!

Your Mom wrote:

Troller Durden wrote:I like stuff like this.

I was starting to wonder if this was turning into my own personal blog.

Macdougal wrote:Well now, both of these are just pretty damn amazing..thanks.