If you enjoyed listening to songs by Radiohead and The Velvet Underground being played on laser-cut wooden records, then you’re going to love this: in late 2011, a German artist by the name of Bartholomäus Traubeck has custom-built a record player that is able to “play” cross-sectional slices of tree trunks. The result is Years, an audio recording of tree rings being read by a computerized mechanism — similar to how a record player reads the grooves on a vinyl album — which then interprets it as audible music.

According to Makezine, the custom record player reads data from the slice of tree trunk using a PlayStation Eye Camera and a stepper motor attached to its control arm, and relays the data to a computer. A program called Ableton Live then uses it to generate a piano track — and while music isn’t created directly from the wood itself, the interpretation of the music varies and is unique to each tree cross-section.

(via Live Science)