The Listening Tree
Ongoing · In-Situ Environmental Installation
Trees are acoustically active organisms. The Listening Tree makes their inner life audible: contact transducers attached to living trunks transform the wood itself into a speaker, letting you hear the clicks and pops of cavitation, the sound of a body pulling water upward against gravity, constantly, silently, until now.
What you hear is real. Trees pull water from root to leaf through tubes so narrow the pressure involved is almost impossible to imagine, like sucking through a straw taller than a building. Sometimes the water column breaks. A tiny air bubble forms and collapses in the same instant. The tree clicks.
Scientists call it cavitation. It happens constantly in living trees, a continuous acoustic record of a body under pressure, working. The Listening Tree makes those clicks audible by attaching contact transducers to the trunk and using the wood itself as a resonating chamber.
Nothing is added. No score, no processing, no field recordings layered in. What comes through is what the tree is doing at that moment: the specific tension in that trunk, the water demand of that canopy, the dry or wet conditions of that day.
The installation can be configured for contemplative listening through headphones, or as a more overtly musical encounter through a spatial speaker array. Its character changes with the weather, the season, and the tree.
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