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Wind sifts through forest leaves while traffic sounds from a nearby highway moan and reverberate in the background off an open prairie landscape just less than a mile away. The wind you feel on your skin has touched both the fire of human-made engines as well as the fragile tips of hundreds of leaves, creating a granular symphony akin to the sound of breaking waves. Listening, you touch both of these seemingly contrasting realities (engine and tree). The two combine to sound as if the trees were speaking with the invention of the human. If “the world is perceiving itself through us,” as David Abram writes, then in perceiving the voices of the trees, we perceive our own. In listening to the voices of the trees, we listen to our own. This particular soundscape envelops and embodies this truth. Traffic (human invention) and tree (“nature”) are not separate. And together, each give the other voice, song. How do we perceive the earth mingled with our own invention? And if we are the world perceiving itself, how do the subtleties of our perception affect the the environment, the world...us? Do we hear the sounds of traffic through trees as ghost-voices of the natural world that have been run roughshod over to make way for our infrastructure? And what of these voices? Are they haunting us, or are they singing altruistic songs of sacrifice to our collective journey of evolution? These questions inform the soundscape of Treeghosts.

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