Tired of listening to Triple M or the latest NPR podcast? Want to experience Melbourne in a new way? Ever wondered about the trees your pass on your way to work?
TreePlayer is an app that allows you to connect to the trees around you through sound.
We are graduates of architecture and we’re interested in creating news ways to experience the world around us. Through TreePlayer, we’ve channelled Melbourne’s Urban Forest and tree canopy datasets into an emergent soundscape, opening up a whole new way for people to engage with Melbourne’s tree community.
We divided the landscape into 50m hexagonal grid to process the data. Each individual tree's characteristics - species, age - was combined with the data taken at grid level - species diversity, canopy density - to produce a unique sound for each tree. As the user moves through the landscape, tree sounds are triggered, generating a changing soundscape that represents a connection between human and tree.
This app is a way for people to access and understand Melbourne’s tree network, through a kind of augmented reality. We hope that TreePlayer will draw attention to the importance of our tree community, and the role it plays in the health of our city’s ecosystem.
