The Grove Quartet
Four trees a few yards apart across a creek, begun across nearly three hundred years, heard together.
Since I first saw these 4 trees at the beginning of the summer, I have thought of them as a quartet, only separated by a few yards across a creek. While all “old,” they began their lives across a period of nearly 300 years, dating to 1559, 1725, 1795, and 1843. Listening to them together required some translation. Directly converting ring-widths to partial tones sounded worse than a cat jumping on a piano, but “binned” within a key, the key of G major in this case, we can enjoy hearing them together.
High pitches still indicate more growth while lower pitches indicate less, but the options are fewer: just 3 octaves in G major with a range of ring sizes assigned to each note. We lose some resolution in exchange for harmony. This track builds from the bottom up, so we listen to bass for 166 years, followed by cello in 1726, viola in 1796, and finally our violin in 1844.
Each tree’s first, partial ring (1559, 1725, 1795, 1843) isn’t counted, so the recording and the tracks below begin with the first full year: 1560, 1726, 1796 and 1844.
Play the grove
The one time the grove agrees
Most years, these four trees keep their own time. A good year for one is often an ordinary year for its neighbor across the creek, which is part of why they needed a shared key to sound well together.
Between 2005 and 2007 that changes. All four put on thin rings at once, the lowest combined stretch since the violin joined in 1844. The cello's narrowest ring is 2006 and the viola's is 2007. The early 2000s were also when the hemlock woolly adelgid reached these mountains. Afterward, the bass and viola recover and grow more than before; the cello and violin do not.
From ring width to G major
Each ring is first turned into a raw tone: the narrowest ring on a core becomes 90 Hz and the widest becomes 255 Hz. On its own that tone can land anywhere, which is why four trees played at once clash.
Binning snaps every raw tone to a note of the G major scale, and each instrument is binned to its own three-octave range, from the bass at the bottom to the violin at the top. The same seven notes repeat in each octave, so a tree’s widest rings can sound up to three octaves above its narrowest.
Choose an instrument and click a bar to hear its range. Click a track above to hear one ring’s raw tone, then the note it becomes.
Who plays which part
Each voice is one increment core. The lines trace every ring, oldest on the left, scaled to that tree's own narrowest and widest years.