Orange peel, tree branches, honey, almonds, rice, coconuts and even bees were among the "instruments' that sound technician Diego Stocco used to create his piece Music from Nature.
He was commissioned by skincare brand Burt's Bees after it saw his first piece of "natural music" -- Music from a Tree, created in his back garden. As he writes in a blog post on Behance.net: "To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I used two Røde NT6 and a NTG-2 as microphones, combined with a customised stethoscope. I recorded the tracks live on a Pro Tools LE system. I didn't use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on."
For Music from Nature, Stocco used a tree but also added a few extra ingredients. Those included, for example, a slice of orange peel -- which produced a "deep bass drum sound" thanks to a contact microphone; and almonds, which provided "percussive sounds". The sound engineer even managed to capture and include the buzz of bees in his composition.
Stocco adds: "I performed the whole composition [which was made to mark Earth Day 2012] by playing these natural elements, no synthesizers, samplers or additional sounds have been used." The only non-natural element was a wind-chime made from Burt's Bees product tins.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
