Sounds of Age: Record Player Makes Music Out of Tree Rings

Most of us learned when we were children that a tree’s interior rings can tell a lot about it. But thanks to Bartholomäus Traubeck, we can now not simply look at tree rings – we can also hear them. Traubeck’s Years project is a modified turntable that plays slices of trees just like records.

There’s a lot of complicated stuff in the project, but the rundown is that it uses a loop-based software music sequencer called Ableton Live to turn those lovely tree rings into even lovelier music. Each tree slice has its own unique “song,” letting us listen to the music of nature in a whole new way.

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See more in Audio & TV or under Gadgets. February, 2012.