There are some inspirational, off-beat composers out there. Namely the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra — playing on carrot-flutes and radish-marimbas — and Joseph Bertolozzi, who turned the entire Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge into a gigantic percussion instrument. And then there was David Byrne’s installation last year, Playing the Building. Most recently, composer and sound designer Diego Stocco appeared on our radar. With an eminently creative mind, Stocco builds music out of ingenious objects like sand and burning pianos. For his latest project he turned to a sprawling old tree in his own backyard.
     “In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs,” he writes on his website. “It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.”
     It turns out he could, so he did, and with no other means than a pencil sharpener, two microphones, and a customized stethoscope he made a track simply by thumbing and shaking the tree. The pencil sharpener was used to trim the twigs so that Stocco could tune them. Connected to a plastic pipe on one end and a microphone on the other, the stethoscope then transmitted the sounds Stocco created. The final version of the track has not been processed or digitally edited in any way. “All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on,” Stocco explains.