Dendrochronology—the study of tree rings—has reached a new level of cutting edge technology. Your average dendrochronologist would tell you that tree rings can tell you the age of a tree, or about environmental changes and weather patterns. Bartholomaus Traubeck will show you that tree rings can sing.
Traubeck is a visual artist who turns technology back in on itself to produce art. He works out of Rotterdam, Netherlands and Linz, Austria. He shifted base for this piece, Years, in order to create a record player that plays cross sections of trees through their series of rings.
It works in the following way; the specifications of each tree ring record are gathered and input into computer hardware. Things such as the texture, thickness, color, strength and rate of growth are taken into consideration by the system which then transforms them into piano music. The greater the texture, the more potent the music can be.