Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: The Living Tree

Issue: XXVI.2 March - April 2019
Page: 10
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Authors:
Frederik Hojlund Westergard, Jonathan Komang-Sonderbek, Malthe Emil Blichfeldt, Jonas Fritsch

The Living Tree is an interactive sound installation to explore the life of trees. To design an immersive and affectively engaging interaction, we deployed surface transducers in a forest in Denmark. The transducers emit vibrations through any material you press them against, turning the material into a speaker. When you place your ear onto the trunk of the tree, you hear the sounds of water running through its wooden veins combined with a heavy pulse and breathing. Through the sonic interaction, people might form new affective attachments to trees as living creatures with personality, character, and expression.

Blichfeldt, M.E., Komang-Sønderbek, J., Westergård, F.H., and Fritsch, J. The Living Tree: Using surface transducers to explore the secret life of trees through sonic interactions. Proc. of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, New York, 2018, 327–330; https://doi.org/10.1145/3197391.3205398

Frederik Højlund Westergård, Jonathan Komang-Sønderbek, Malthe Emil Blichfeldt, and Jonas Fritsch, IT University of Copenhagen
[email protected]

ins02.gif The soundscape is activated and changes depending on your movements around the tree based on readings from a Kinect sensor.