Tree-rings can tell us stories about the lives of trees. Tree rings can be analyzed for strength, thickness and rate of growth. This information can give clues about the growth rate of the tree, and give information about droughts, fires, floods, or other natural events.
German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has created a record-player which is capable of digitally reading tree-slices and translating them into piano music. This record-player, called “Years,” plays slices of woods and uses the program Arduino to transform the rings into sounds. For the piece, a camera takes an image of the tree ring and sends this to Arduino, a electronic programming and processing tool. Traubeck programmed Arudiono to interpret the tree ring in terms of thickness, strength, and rate of growth which is mapped to a scale of the overall appearance of the wood. This information is then mapped to piano sounds.
In the videos of the piece on Vimeo, you can see that the player plays various tree disks including a fir tree and an ash tree with a complex texture.
The resulting sounds piece is an interesting interpretation of trees and sound.
Image Source:
Years – on Vimeo
Links:
Years on Creative Applications.net