Eight trees stand close together. Their branches interweave, touching one another at certain points. trees is a piece about these touches – and about the rooms in which music is made.

For trees, I connected my interest in room resonances with the studios of the musicians – rooms in which we spend many devoted hours working on new music. Their sound is an invisible yet essential part of our musical world. Corresponding to its air columns, every room has three principal resonances. You can imagine them as three strings stretched through the room: lengthwise, crosswise, and from ceiling to floor. I measured these resonances or calculated them from the rooms' dimensions. Like many sound phenomena, room resonances have stretched overtones. This resulted in eight complex spectral "rooms". Notated as chords, they look like trees whose crowns interweave ever more finely.

This metaphor became the form. Like a mythical creature living in this grove, I slowly make my way down from the crowns, from one tree to the next, until I reach the trunks. The moment of leaping from one tree to the next – finding a branch that touches the other tree – becomes a ritual, marked by a bell plate. In it, I see what is precious, fragile, and deeply human about music played live.

The electronics consist of played-back synthesizer sounds. As a meta-instrument, the synthesizer integrates my own sound into the instrumental community, connecting it at its roots like a subterranean web.