Most people are familiar with engaging wood as a material, losing sight of its origin as a tree. With this project, we wondered how we could breathe life and give a “voice” to wood - its lifeless form - by conveying meaningful data about individual trees through sound.

 

Tree Whisperer is a series of wind-up instrumental objects that work as music boxes. Each object produces unique pulsing beats that reflect how different tree species would respond to the changing global climate. The pitch and tempo of beats reflect the extent of climate change on each tree - a higher pitch and quickening pace of (faster) beats reflect a tree that is becoming more distressed. By introducing a visual and auditory reference to time as well as heartbeats, these objects call us to vividly confront the urgency of climate change in the context of tree deaths.

 

2 specific tropical hardwoods have been chosen as the focus: Meranti and Keruing. These are linked to two ecologically and economically important yet threatened Dipterocarp trees in Southeast Asia. Together, the wooden trees create an image of the Southeast Asian forest. Data for the current project was extracted and interpreted based on projected changes in suitable climate space for both tree types (Deb et al., 2017), but can be extended to every biotope if the data is made available.

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This work has been selected for development by the Timber Trade Federation as part of the Conversations about Climate Change Competition 2020.  The exhibition will take place at the Building Centre in UK from February to September 2021. For this exhibition, only the coloured trees are functional and can be wound up to produce music.

 

Featured on Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/03/04/ttf-timber-trade-federation-conversations-about-climate-change/

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References:

Deb, J., Phinn, S., Butt, N., & McAlpine, C. (2017, March 5). The impact of climate change on the distribution of two threatened Dipterocarp trees. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28405287