Space Song Art Center is a record of songs by Space Song President Julia Christensen and long-time collaborator Tom Hall. The works are all made using data generated by three trees in Christensen’s 2020 solo exhibition, Upgrade Available, at ArtCenter’s Mullin Gallery in downtown Pasadena. The Tree of Life gallery installation is a prototype of the larger installation the Space Song is currently building in Hinkley, California. The gallery iteration consists of three live trees in the gallery augmented with sensors that collect data describing the water, light and temperature conditions of the trees. This data was collected around the clock for the entire length of the show, and every hour, the data points were uploaded as text files to a digital memory cloud.

In the gallery, those data sets ran into a computer running a Max/MSP patch to translate the numbers into sound, which was played in real time in the gallery. Each tree had three voices singing data points collected by its three sensors; in other words, each tree had a water voice, a light voice, and a temperature voice. These voices were woven together in a process of additive synthesis, so that the sound of the trees evolved slowly, slowly, over the long course of the phantom exhibition. Hall and Christensen decided that the trees  should sing at a resonant frequency of planet Earth, an incredibly low sound at 7.83 Hz. Tom Hall remembers that when he was installing the piece in Pasadena, he went to the bathroom at a falafel place down the street, and the fixtures were rattling on the bathroom wall. The Earth is resonant, indeed.

The exhibition never opened, due to the 2020 pandemic and wildfires. Christensen and Hall decided to process the data from those trees to create a new life for the installation, and so, The Tree of Life at ArtCenter as it has been born into its next life, reincarnated as a vinyl record. Christensen and Hall got out the dusty old data files from the ArtCenter exhibition and used Max/MSP to parse the data to sonify it in new ways, allowing the experience of the trees to finally be heard beyond the gallery walls.

The songs on this album are prototypes, just as the gallery installation is a prototype. Tom Hall created a piece that closely reflects the experience of the gallery installation. Christensen took the data and experimented with the myriad ways we can reprocess it over and over and forever. As the Space Song Foundation learns more about how the tree data can be expressed as an audio experience, the songs will change. Explaining dendrology via sonic wavelengths is a welcome challenge, and the SSF expects the sound system to change as they refine their process.

Eventually, the Tree of Life songs will be heard at the sites of trees around the globe, and also live on the world wide web. From time to time, they might also drop another physical album in the spirit of the longevity and objecthood.

To purchase the record Tree Songs Art Center, head to the Space Song Foundation’s Bandcamp page.