Video

Music From Unusual Sources

A talented German artist creates beautiful sounds in unconventional ways.

With Two Axes In a Forest, the video above, German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has made two instruments play each other autonomously. The musical installation relies on transducers, which induce the sound signal of one guitar back into the other. The loop is meant to create a resonance between the instruments that is nearly identical. Although, as the artist points out on his website, “since these two industrially manufactured objects are not completely alike, the frequencies never match perfectly and subtle shifts happen in the texture of the sound.

Traubeck’s larger body of work often uses sound created in usual ways. His widely circulated video, YEARS, for instance, features a turntable that is designed to read the rings in a tree trunk. The resulting music is haunting and unexpectedly beautiful. Traubeck has even created an album that features tracks recorded from different trees.

In his piece A Long Echo Into Noise, featured below, you can hear the entire lifespan of a record. The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is played until the record is worn down, mirroring the echo a piece of art may have as it is sampled and copied over time.