From the myth of Apollo and Daphne to The Vegetarian, the idea of transforming oneself into a tree as a way of escaping suffering has been present in the arts. This project explores it through sound, using Deep Learning tools both to transform timbre in real time and to interact with the sound environment through gesture and movement.

What does a tree sound like? The sound of foliage swaying in the wind, or the crunch of leaves underfoot quickly come to mind. And the bark? Being such a textural element, it can be captured by dragging contact microphones across its surface. In this project, field recordings of these sounds will be used to train neural synthesis models such as DDSP or RAVE, which will later be used to hybridise live with the human voice. And the roots? Generally hidden and inaccessible, we can only imagine certain sounds based on intuition and the study of how they work. Concatenative synthesis techniques will be explored to materialise them.

In a techno-dependent and frenetic society that has forgotten its natural origins, trees, far from being decorative objects or a source of resources, retain the capacity to fascinate that once made them divine. Perhaps by putting ourselves in their shoes, we will go from looking at them with disdain to looking at them with envy.