The Ventilator

Incorporating The Ranger's Blog

Trees

Music from a tree

Matthew Chatfield
Latest posts by Matthew Chatfield (see all)

A manky old holm oak that’s had some very unsympathetic work done to it… a musician with a stethoscope and a pencil sharpener… the ingredients for one of the more unusual musical performances to be found on the internet:

What it lacks in musical finesse it certainly offers in ingenuity and novelty. The artist, Italian sound designer and composer Diego Stocco, says:

I love to create new sound experiences in unusual ways. I create my sounds from different sources, it can be an object or something that I build from scratch. In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it. To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I didn’t use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.

(From Julian Dunster via UKTC)

Matthew Chatfield

Uncooperative crusty. Unofficial Isle of Wight cultural ambassador. Conservation, countryside and the environment, with extra stuff about spiders.

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