Lamento explores the piano as a musical instrument and its prehistory as a tree growing in a forest. The attempt has been to make the material history and the transformation from tree to wood audible. How, by transforming from a living tree in nature, it has been instrumentalized to become a piece of wood in a piano. The work thus addresses issues of transformation from nature to culture.

The sonic material consists of recorded tones and sounds from eight pianos. From eight speakers mounted on tree trunks in a forest, sounds are heard from each speaker representing one of the instruments. Through the speakers, the eight different instruments slowly play a C major scale, time after time. Note by note, the pianos ascend the seven pitches in a lament; a lament for all the trees that have been cut down and for those that will be cut down to become part of an instrument.

An essential part of the work is the natural sounds of the forest itself and how these sounds interact with the sounds of the pianos in an ever-changing way. The sounds of the wood of the piano are integrated with the previous sounds of the wood of the piano; the forest. By integrating sounds from the piano into an environment where the instruments once lived as trees, two segments of the same subject are allowed to coexist for a moment.