One of my favourite authors of all time is Roald Dahl – from the wonderment of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the history of Going Solo and the humour of George’s Marvellous Medicine.

And then there were the truly great Tales of the Unexpected. Creepy. Odd. Fantastical. I still enjoy re-reading them now, and one of my favourite tales was the Sound Machine.

This story tells of how an inventor creates an amplifying machine which can actually hear the sounds of the plants – how the roses screamed whilst being deadheaded and how the trees moan when struck.

It has always fascinated me – does our plant kingdom actually create sounds which are just out of our audible range?

So imagine my joy when I found this beautiful art piece by Bartholomaus Traubeck – the ‘Years Turntable’. Just as a standard turntable uses the grooves to play the record, this updated version uses a Playstation Camera mounted on the arm to ‘play’ the slice of timber by reading the rings like grooves. This connects to a computer which translates the patterns into notes.

The music created is very sombre and almost disturbing, yet strangely compelling.

click here to hear the sound of YEARS

Roald Dahl would have loved it.