In Roald Dahl’s short story The Sound Machine, we learn about a device made to hear the inaudible. Its inventor—a young, anxious man who lives in the middle of the woods—does not know what he will listen to with his machine. The outcome is something he did not suspect: the machine could capture and make audible to human ears the screams of pain that flowers and trees produce when getting hurt. With this short story in mind, Dialecto de Arbol No.5 considers the sonic language of trees, asking critically how nonhuman forms may communicate and how they are affected by human presence.

Dialecto de Arbol No.5 is an interdisciplinary digital creation scored for female voice, clarinet, bass clarinet, multi-channel electronics, and digital installation. The piece is conceptualized around the imagined conversations of trees from across Turtle Island and The Americas and features a musical work composed by composer/percussionist Luis Fernando Amaya, interpreted by soprano Meghan Lindsay and clarinetist Juan Gabriel Olivares, with a visual landscape created by digital artist Alex McLeod. In Dialecto de Arbol No.5, each tree is given a unique visual and sonic identity, asking how the relationship between humans and non-humans can be transformed through imagination in art-making. The central idea in Dialecto de Arbol No.5 is positioning imagination (conceptual, sonic, and visual) as a tool to challenge the wide-spread Western conception that non-human others belong to an ontological category that is beneath humans and, thus, do not deserve the same considerations as humans do. As the viewer enters a digital landscape of trees- each with their unique identity, voice, and behaviour-Dialecto de Arbol No.5 considers how art making can contribute to the broader role of environmental activism by creating empathetic connections with nonhuman life.

In this work, Amaya challenges Western traditions of composition through a democratic, playful, and improvisatory construction of sounds informed by voice memos, diagrams, poetry, anecdotes, photos, and visual artifacts. All of the project was recorded and remotely. Through Zoom, Whatsapp, in-house recordings, and shared transcripts, the artists will be collaborating cross-culturally between Puerto Rico and Canada to co-cocreate a sonic and visual world that centres the imagined and unique sounds of the trees and land whose space we share.