NATALIYA PETKOVA

Music for roots

2013

Biography

Born in Bulgaria, Nataliya Petkova obtained a Bachelor’s degree from the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Marseille. The artist also holds a Master’s degree from the Université Laval, where she studied under Jocelyn Robert. Her works freely combine various media, including digital arts, sound art, open-source software, video and photography. She has shown her works in both solo and group exhibitions, and presented interventions/performances in Europe, the United States, Canada and Africa.

About the work

Music for Roots is an extension of the Music for Trees project, created in 2009. An ephemeral installation set up on a mountaintop, it utilizes a bass string, a guitar pick-up that captures the vibrations of the string, and a recording device. The site chosen for the installation is a tree overlooking a cliff, whose roots are exposed to the wind. Following Music for Trees, which recorded the sound produced by the wind against the bark of a tree growing in an urban environment, Music for Roots uses the same procedure, but this time with the roots of a tree, at a high elevation. The sound recorded is amplified to the maximum degree, revealing a composition consisting mostly of bass frequencies combining in irregular rhythms, against a background of high frequencies, likely produced by the mix of residual vibrations from the bass string and electric current. Finally, the composition was amplified, then filtered so as to be made audible.