What Is The Sound Of A Tree Growing?
By: Hal Baum
You know the sound I’m talking about. It’s kind of a crackling, creaking, bonestraining kind of sound. You hear it in movies and in cartoons. Whenever the wise old oak comes to life to grant the child the wisdom of the forest, whenever a flower turns evil and goes from a seed to a giant toothy flytrap in a matter of seconds, whenever some forest spirit shoots a green blasts from it’s fingertips and the whole area suddenly erupts in spontaneous vegetation. Giant trunks rise from the ground, spiraling towards the sky, limbs forming and stretching and branching in all directions, filling suddenly with leaves. The tree blooms, and spreads it’s fingers through the air, growing and shifting, expanding into the sky. You hear that sound. That crackling sound.
What is that sound? Actually? What is the person in the booth doing to make that sound? That sound doesn’t actually occur in nature. Trees and plants don’t grow fast enough for us to hear it, but whenever that magic moment happens in a movie or an anime they have a sound prepared. What is it? What makes that sound?
Papers being crinkled? Dry leaves being rustled? Someone breathing loudly into the microphone?
I googled: “What is the sound of a tree growing?” I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t get the answer I was looking for. I don’t know how I could possibly find out.
What is that sound? What is the sound of a tree growing? And what is a tree anyway? And what is the difference between a tree and a bird? What is the difference between a bird and a person?
I might have written a song for Kurt’s tree, and I did write a song for Jen’s bird, but I would never write a song for Jeff’s person.
It would feel like I was forcing something on him. Like a preacher at a funeral who says something you know isn’t true about the deceased, and you think to yourself: “You didn’t know my Grandpa! Don’t put words in his mouth! That’s not what my Gandpa sounded like! Quit using my grandpa as a puppet for your show about Jesus!”
I wouldn’t want to do that to Jeff’s person. Make them sing my song. It would be disrespectful. But I would have written a song for Kurt’s tree to sing, and in the this show I do sing a song for Jen’s bird.
What is the sound of a tree? What is the sound of a bird? What is the sound of a person? Papers being crinkled? Dry leaves being rustled? Someone breathing loudly into the microphone?
I googled “What is the difference between a bird and a person.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t get the answer I was looking for.
The Arrow is going to show up this coming Wednesday night at the Neo-Futurists, in the form of The Arrow Drops Anchor. After that, it will drift away, and turn into something new.
Hal Baum is a featured performer in the show, and here he addresses the concern of writing into, out of, and for other people — a primary attribute of what The Arrow demands as a structure. He mentions here about how he wrote a song for Jen, taking a moment of vulnerability and exploding it into something anthemic. Listening to that song, everyone in rehearsal, in their hearts, were like, “Holy shit. Is that Hal?” He’s so unassuming. It was like suddenly hearing a tree grow.
Come see more Hal. This Wednesday.
~Kurt
