Sonaflora Moreland Four music scores and four sound works created using plant species documented across various green spaces across the City of Moreland during the various Covid 19 lockdowns of 2020/21. These included various sites along the Merri Creek in North Fitzroy, Brunswick East, Coburg and Fawkner. These works have been made to be experienced in real life using the augmented reality app Zome, Zome (zome-ar.com) an app that lets the user access site specific digital information, in this case the music that has been created for the plants used in the music scores which can be accessed at the exact site of each plant. This project has been designed to experience the plant score music at the site of each plant.

The plants can also be found at the map links below .

Just follow Dylan Martorell on Zome or use the map guide below to find the plants.

https://www.google.com/maps/placelists/list/qVtYJe5OKh0PwEKud6MpDP9rafMrSw

This score is quite similar in construction to 1a and again has split the growth and resulting sonification into a left and right hand channel. Recorded on Synthstrom Deluge and Elektron Digitone, August 2020.

Supported by the

City of Melbourne

COVID 19 Arts Grants

As part of the performance program accompanying The Score, Martorell and a group of musicians will stage a performance of these scores within the groundsof the System Garden. Surrounded by the plants which provided the structure of the music, Martorell will lead his audience through a cycle of formal translations from source object, to drawing, to sculpture, to music , and back to object again.

Buckminster Fuller and others of his ilk have often looked at the geometry of a natural form in a stagnant state when mapping it out into architectural and engineering projects (not to say he and others have not looked at nature as a fluid form), but the fluidity and rhythm of nature is paramount to its form and is, in a sense, its form. Indeed, movement is the form of nature, one of the resonances of this movement is sound, and it is both an aural and visual resonance. I remember being intreegued (big pun) when reading the secret life of plants, by (not sure actually if it's that touched on in the book, but it was defiantly a main trail of thought in my mind) the time scale of plants, this drone existence is one to be envied, it is one that is easier or more experiential for us to fell and explore through sound, and in Dylan's case visual representations of sound. Plants indeed do this through their passionate murmurs and earth rumbling growth spurts. The aural range of plants in a time scale is far superior to that of any fauna, including man. Much of sound/music focuses on a linear moving forward, not on the floral branching out and slow growth, it is something to take on in composition and listening to sound, for instance, that beats can be decades apart. This being the case for ye olde trees, or that that fungi (can't remember his/her name) that spreads for miles, could make bleeps of joy suburbs away. 

From the cracking of branches to the crystalline growth and symphony of photosynthesis plants also have an anthemic happy hardcore of their time frame, this is hard to hear in real time. If it was amplified and speed up, it would I think take on a jagged posi-techno glacial feeling. 

Machines and plants share an alien and robotic identity in our view of them. It is a humanising in a way, but it is also above this, as some higher understanding be it spiritual or post humanist, non animalistic. In that machines take human form, but pose some kind of super threat, like higher beings or aliens. Plants also have been viewed like this, for example day of the triffids, or little shop of horrors. Also there is something that links techno/electronic music to plant life, there is the view of space and time as a similarity of drug use and plant time/space. But aside from the cultural connections, there are also the cycles of electronic music in relation to plant cycles. The sameness of micro chips and root systems, and time expanding relations of repetition in relation to the time span of much of plant life. This is surely part of the appeal of out door raves/ doofs, being one with nature, with plants. 

The dew drops on leaves at a different speed add a poppy dub beat (little pun). Plants are so a part of culture that they have their points of cringe, be it airy and hippy or through the standardisation of consumable vegetable material. But the exploration of plants is something that is deep and without ends to discover. This can be approached in a clinically scientific way, or more experimentally. Both in doses is probably the best way. The sound world of plants is quite an abstract space for exploration.