Mixtape Muse: Listen To the Life of A Tree, Just Like a Vinyl Record

For those of you that missed it, German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck is a genius. Why? Well, Traubeck has created a way to translate tree rings into music in a project appropriately titled "Years." These circular patterns inside tree trunks have long since been a way to learn about the life of a tree, which seems like a rather dry way of discovering the details on these significant organisms. On the other hand, music has always presented itself as an exciting and terrific way of documenting history, as well as the best, most genuine way of expressing one's story, and journey. Trees may be stationary objects and seem like very simple elements of our world's landscape, but hearing their lives will certainly change your view of them in the future.

Traubeck modified and developed a special record player that uses a camera to read tree rings. Spinning sliced discs of wood, these lines are read and translated into incredibly beautiful piano music. This is really something you have to see and hear.

Traubeck describes "Years" to Creative Applications:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music based on the year ring data. Those are analyzed for their thickness and growth rate and are then mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appeareance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.