For some minds, the forest is a landscape of enjoyment or pleasure, a place that triggers emotions never found in our stressful urban environment. What’s the magic? Is it the blend of
sounds just above audible levels, mixed with the surprise element of sounds that could send a shiver done our spines or instantly wake us from the hibernation mode of our minds? Is it the smell of the fresh air, the flowery fields, the stale smell of the bark of a decaying tree, or the year old grass of the meadows gently letting its dewy nightgown fall? Is the light, or the reflections of the environment setting us in that mood? It might be all of these; it might be none of them. The most probable conclusion is that it is up to the observer, the investigator, the user of the environment.

What this project is about is capturing some of the essences just described, move the environment closer to the urban man, and investigate how we could get that same feeling, the feeling of something uncontrolled so intimately connected to our most profound senses. Through adding the possibility of immediate interaction with the environment itself we hope to capture even more minds, more senses, more interest from both conscious and unconscious users.

THE BACKGROUND

We came up with an idea of having the ability to change the sounds of a synthesizer through giving the users a recording device and let them capture and download sounds to it. The first sketches of the output device of this installation consisted of a wall much similar to an ordinary synthesizer only with rearranged and reconfigured buttons to press. We started looking at connections to human experiences of sound and how we could integrate our ideas in some kind of larger context, and the idea of using trees as music playing objects started to evolve. The use of this environment gives us not only a greater experience for the user, but a whole new meaning to our capture and publish way of thinking. Our first devices were small, easy to misplace or even steal but by using a two meter high tree as a capturing device we hope this phenomenon could be delimited. The forest also has its own sound in a way, and the way this forest will sound is like its surrounding. The purpose of the capturing possibility is to reflect the surrounding in which the installation is placed.