Tree Listening

The tree quartet imagines four trees roughly situated at four corners of a piece of the allee as receivers, transmitters, conduits for sound. The trees listen, they perform, they are performed by people, wind, birds. Each tree is equipped with a contact microphone and a guitar amplifier situated to create a space which gathers the four trees and begins to depict the soundscape of the trees as individual attentive bodies and the allee as a collective array of antennae. (recording by Jesse Vogler)

tree listening

Worm’s Eye View




Tree Listening






Listening to a Tree

Provoked by questions surrounding the nature of sound in/through/among trees, we completed our first auditory exploration on tree C7 in the allee. Carefully working through the layers of bark until we encountered the living matter of the tree, we carved a 4 inch square hollow in which to place our listening device. This device is an ElectroVoice Model 805 Crystal Contact Microphone, circa 1950 (incidentally and coincidentally,this exact model of microphone has apparently been used on trees before to record beetle movement!).


The first tests frame the tree as a resonator, planting the microphone within the hollow and recording the output with a zoom mic. Using a mallet on the bark we circumscribed the tree with a series of taps moving first away from the mic and returning to it from the other side. This exercise produces a few new ways in which to draw/diagram the tree. The recorded audio itself (with some simple noise reduction applied) places us in the sonic space of the tree. The spectral frequency of this recording also allows us to understand the tree in a new way.

C7_spectral frequency

What does the attack, decay, sustain, release profile of these mallet strikes tell us? Can the heartwood be read from the signal? Or does the variation simply indicate the difficulty in maintaining a consistent signal from point to point? Thirdly, the dance around the tree with the mallet serves as a diagram. Certainly much more can be mined from this first test. The next step will be to frame the tree as an articulator, listening for the sounds the tree itself produces, especially as it begins to wake from it’s winter slumber.

The Log Driver’s Waltz


A little bit of tree culture, this short animation developed by the National Film Board of Canada was used often as filler between television programs when I was growing up. The Log Driver’s Waltz puts a romantic spin on Canada’s long history in the logging industry. As a kid I used to love when this would come on.


Chimeric Sensing

Diagrams and illustrations of the brain and it’s reception of sensory information by Spanish neuroscientist  Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Klein 2017)


The term chimera is used to describe organisms composed of cells which originate from  two or more distinct genetic genealogies. It has been suggested that the cilia which facilitate the human senses may be “chimeric compounds of once free-living organism, now yoked together in our animal bodies and harnessed to enable sensory apprehension” (Helmreich 2016, 175) implying that we ourselves are chimeric organisms. If this is so, can some of our genetic lineage be traced back to trees, also considered chimeric organisms? And what are the chimeric compounds with which trees sense the world? Beyond this biological chimerism there also exists a technique called auditory chimerism a tactic used to decompose and reconstruct sound recordings “realized through a technical practice of sieving one sound through the other—pressing the ‘fine structure’ (the second-to-second pitch and texture) of one sound (say, a drum) through the ‘envelope’ (overall attack, sustain, and decay profile) of another (say, a piano).” (Helmreich 2016, 174).

Timbre also plays an important role in the study of auditory chimerism. It is described as “that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a listener can judge two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch as being dissimilar.” (Helmreich 2016, 176). There might then be two ways to explore trees in terms of sound. As articulators (producing sounds of their own) and as resonators (instruments to be played). If we were to record the sounds emanating from the trees and recognize dissimilarity in these sounds across different trees or different species of tree, perhaps a taxonomy of tree sound could be established, suggesting the idea of a timber timbre. And applying techniques of auditory chimerism, passing the fine structure of tree sound through the envelope of human speech (and vice versa), could be one way of exploring a biological chimerism that speaks to other relationships between people and trees.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2016. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 

Klein, Joanna. 2017. “Hunched Over a Microscope, He Sketched the Secrets of How the Brain Works.” New York Times, February 17.