Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: The Living Tree

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]

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