Peter Noble

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A Dead Tree’s SongMan with guitar sings against shadowy background with branches making shadowy shapes against white wall

Peter Noble is a singer-songwriter and educator living in the Scottish Highlands. His doctoral research investigates the extent to which song can serve as a vessel for complex layers of meaning, memory, and experience. His practice is informed by Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects and the framework of Aboriginal songlines. In his most recent creative work ‘All That Remains’, he has composed songs and performances that narrate the histories of places around the Cromarty Firth where landscapes or landmarks have vanished or been erased completely. 

The immersive presentation I am sharing aims to bring a dead elm tree back to life for a moment. The song is written from the point of view of a tree that stands on the edge of the A9 on the Cromarty Firth. This tree’s song serves as an entry point into a variety of interwoven stories. 

It is about resilience and loss. Local elm populations have borne the impact of Dutch elm disease—some surviving, many not. The song traces a temporal arc, following the postglacial migration of elm trees from southern Europe to northern Scotland over 10,000 years. An elm may have stood here for more than a millennium, bearing silent witness to centuries of transformation. 

The rustle of wind through leaves reanimates the tree, enacting a sonic resurrection. This aims to carry sensorial depth, adding layers of memory onto place. The song also commemorates the Wych Elm of Beauly, once the oldest known elm in the region, which stood for 800 years before succumbing to a storm in 2023. Its fall marked the transition from a living monument to a remembered absence. 

These layered narratives—ecological, historical, and personal—reside within the landscape of the Cromarty Firth like the strata of sedimentary rock. They form a hyperobject: vast, entangled, and elusive, extending beyond immediate perception and dissolving into the terrain. Through performance, I seek to render these complexities audible, musically creating a place that resists singular definition and instead holds multitudes. 

You can listen to Peter’s music on Spotify here, and you can listen on Bandcamp below.

SGSAH; SGSAH ResearchCONNECT WITH PETER
E-mail: peter.noble@uhi.ac.uk