Tag Archives: Skooby Laposky

Tree music

Hidden Life Radio livestreams music generated from trees (their biodata, that is). Kristin Toussaint in her August 3, 2021 article for Fast Company describes the ‘radio station’, Note: Links have been removed,

Outside of a library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an over-80-year-old copper beech tree is making music.

As the tree photosynthesizes and absorbs and evaporates water, a solar-powered sensor attached to a leaf measures the micro voltage of all that invisible activity. Sound designer and musician Skooby Laposky assigned a key and note range to those changes in this electric activity, turning the tree’s everyday biological processes into an ethereal song.

That music is available on Hidden Life Radio, an art project by Laposky, with assistance from the Cambridge Department of Public Works Urban Forestry, and funded in part by a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council. Hidden Life Radio also features the musical sounds of two other Cambridge trees: a honey locust and a red oak, both located outside of other Cambridge library branches. The sensors on these trees are solar-powered biodata sonification kits, a technology that has allowed people to turn all sorts of plant activity into music.

… Laposky has created a musical voice for these disappearing trees, and he hopes people tune into Hidden Life Radio and spend time listening to them over time. The music they produce occurs in real time, affected by the weather and whatever the tree is currently doing. Some days they might be silent, especially when there’s been several days without rain, and they’re dehydrated; Laposky is working on adding an archive that includes weather information, so people can go back and hear what the trees sound like on different days, under different conditions. The radio will play 24 hours a day until November, when the leaves will drop—a “natural cycle for the project to end,” Laposky says, “when there aren’t any leaves to connect to anymore.”

The 2021 season is over but you can find an archive of Hidden Life Radio livestreams here. Or, if you happen to be reading this page sometime after January 2022, you can try your luck and click here at Hidden Life Radio livestreams but remember, even if the project has started up again, the tree may not be making music when you check in. So, if you don’t hear anything the first time, try again.

Want to create your own biodata sonification project?

Toussaint’s article sent me on a search for more and I found a website where you can get biodata sonification kits. Sam Cusumano’s electricity for progress website offers lessons, as well as, kits and more.

Sophie Haigney’s February 21, 2020 article for NPR ([US] National Public Radio) highlights other plant music and more ways to tune in to and create it. (h/t Kristin Toussaint)