Tree of Life Project - Nicole Daskas & Olivia Collins


Olivia Collins & Nicole Daskas 
Lia Halloran
Intersection of Art & Science
December 11, 2019 
The Sounds of Nature
The Sounds of Nature is a sound piece project created between Nicole Daskas and Olivia Collins. The project produces a symphony of natural noises through individual clips combined in one video. The piece incorporates different footage shot from nature in Zion National Park. Zion has a range of scenery from canyons to waterfalls that help capture a variety of sounds. Although everywhere in the park is surrounded by constant subtle noises, only scenes that had a presence on its own are incorporated. It only takes place in this one location to make the project cohesive visually. Filming at a national park helped with not including any man made elements such as buildings or cars to keep the theme of only natural visuals and sounds. 
The video is created by layering different videos on top of one another. It is important to keep the visual of each noise in the piece so the viewer can think of each location as a contributor to the symphony. The video has one closeup of running water that stands as the base for the whole project while all the other clips are layered on top. Water is the most common natural sound of nature so it is included from many different sources. Water also sounds different from different sources so layering several water sounds still makes interestings noises. The other footage ranges from the wind blowing through trees and leaves rustling on the ground. When there is more than one video over the base, it becomes a window of four. This window is what creates the most sound since five videos are played at once. The video starts slowly, taking time for a new video to appear overtop. Once the four videos have been placed, the video subtracts them until it ends with the original clip of running water. The video will take away the clips out of order from how they first appeared making new combinations of sounds. 
This piece was inspired by JPL’s Tree of Life Project. After seeing the presentation on this project we became interested in the sounds that nature makes. In the Tree of Life project, a signal is sent between a tree and a cubesat in space to make collaborative sound art. This sound is made from the receptors, that will be placed on the tree, and the cubesat. This began our interest in natural sounds and collaborative elements in creating sounds. We wanted our version of a sound piece to have different scenes of nature performing together, similar to the tree and the cubesat. The signal in the Tree of Life project helps tell the story of the tree with different pitches and sounds meaning a variety of conditions of the tree and what surrounds it. We wanted our sounds to come from the current state of these natural locations so that these sounds report the current weather condition of each area.

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