This is an excerpt from the record Years, created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, which features seven recordings from different Austrian trees including Oak, Maple, Walnut, and Beech. What you are hearing is an Ash tree’s year ring data. Every tree sounds vastly unique due to varying characteristics of the rings, such as strength, thickness and rate of growth.
Keep in mind that the tree rings are being translated into the language of music, rather than sounding musical in and of themselves. Traubeck’s one-of-a-kind record player uses a PlayStation Eye Camera and a stepper motor attached to its control arm. It relays the data to a computer with a program called Ableton Live. What you end up with is an incredible piano track, and in the case of the Ash, a very eerie one.
Hats off to Traubeck for coming up with the ingenious method to turn a simple slice of wood into a beautiful unique arraignment. It makes you wonder what types of music other parts of nature would play.
Well it's cool in a "everything is maths/music" type of angle but I reckon the actual reality of creating this is a lot simpler than it might seem on first viewing.
mks wrote:Do you think he's using Max for Live to translate the camera to those piano notes?
Pretty much. I mean in Max you can take a camera feed and get a stream of numbers out regarding the colour and light and shit on different pixels. Then it's just a matter of some sort of conditional statements and a way of scaling it to turn it into a selection of conventionally pleasing set of MIDI notes.
skimpi wrote:how do you know he isnt just playing you a beat he made and making up some bullshit?
Because actually turning a bunch of numbers into MIDI notes within a specific musical scale in Max/msp isn't very hard anyway and the camera is a good source of data and the tree rings a source of some sort of pattern to the data. It's probably not very hard.
wolf89 wrote:Well it's cool in a "everything is maths/music" type of angle but I reckon the actual reality of creating this is a lot simpler than it might seem on first viewing.
Don't know if the difficulty of making it is really relevant?
