Bartholomäus Traubeck’s “Years” is one of those designs that embodies much more than its one-line description might suggest: simply put, it’s “a record player that plays slices of wood, [in which] year ring data is translated into music.”.
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. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance 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.
The design object is at once material—an interactive sculpture—and immaterial, interpreting an inanimate ‘fossil’ into arguably the most abstract art form: music. Thus, the record player spans the natural, pre-analog world of time immemorial and the digital alchemy of transcribing visual data (the rings of the tree) into sound, duly referencing an iconic analog medium as the bridge between the two worlds.
As with a record, the physical (i.e. analog) aspect of the recording remains opaque: we understand that there is a relationship between the infinitesimal grooves in the vinyl and the music that emerges from the black box, but it’s impossible to discern what it the recording like by sight or touch. Just as a needle translates the physical into meaningful sounds, so too does the camera of Traubeck’s record player read the ‘pattern’ embedded in a cross-section of a tree trunk.
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