Diego Stocco: Music From A Tree

Italian-born, California-based sound designer and composer Diego Stocco is Internet famous for making music using random sounds from natural “instruments.” This video, “Music From A Tree,” is our fave. Looking outside at an oddly-shaped tree in his Burbank garden, Stocca decided to mic it up and make music from it:

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 customized 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.

Super awesome. You can check out pics at Behance and download the tree track at Bandcamp.