Photo: konzeptm

The sound of a forest is music to my ears, but there’s an artist who has taken that thought one literal step further and made music from wood. Specifically, Bartholomäus Traubeck has taken slices of trees and digitally converted the age rings into piano music.

From Traubeck’s web site:

“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.

Years
Artist: Bartholomäus Traubeck

“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.”

Years
Artist: Bartholomäus Traubeck

The music doesn’t sound at all like the symphony I hear while out in the forest, and if trees really do speak to one another, I suspect this would sound to them like a foreign language. Still, it’s an interesting attempt at translation.