‘Some plants are too crazy’: muso’s sonic map retunes the daily walk

Gardens are never silent. They are filled with sounds that can lull or aggravate. Everything from rustling leaves and singing birds to humming traffic and buzzing mosquitoes can be heard in a garden. Artist and musician Dylan Martorell wants us to discern even more.

For the past year he has been creating sonic works that translate the physical formations of plants into music. He says it’s got to the point where he “can’t walk anywhere” without thinking about what sort of scores the different plants he comes across would make.

It’s a new take on how we usually experience plants. Instead of just looking, smelling, touching, and maybe even talking to a plant, Martorell gets us sampling how a particular part of it sounds. Take the growth nodes on a wiry branchlet of a casuarina, for example. In Martorell’s hands they are not just potential new shoots but also interlocking percussive drum cycles.

He turns the circling succulent leaves of an agave from a geometric visual pattern into a slowly evolving aural tone and translates the large dissected foliage of the Cussonia spicata into a score by splitting the growth on a single leaf into the left-hand side and right-hand side of the midrib, which corresponds to the left-hand and right-hand audio channels.

He says developing these scores is an “incredibly time-consuming process” that involves a number of steps. First he takes photographs, then he manually marks out a particular component of the plant’s structure onto a printed image. He then plots these marks onto a grid with the vertical axis representing time and the horizontal axis representing sound, thereby creating a score.

Some of the scores are for electronic instruments and some are for traditional ones, such as the marimba or harpsichord, and each lasts between one and seven minutes. Martorell, whose music-based art practice has long focused on concepts of transience and community engagement, began translating plants into sounds about 10 years ago, but says he has found himself increasingly drawn to the process since the start of the pandemic.

“It’s almost like an excuse to do a deep dive into nature,” he says.

Later this month, he will post a series of walking maps on his website, with GPS coordinates, that people can download. They can then visit the plants he has translated into music and, while there, use an app to play the sound work and look at his intricate anatomical drawings and marked-up photographs. It’s the sort of display that even a lockdown can’t disrupt (provided it is within your permitted radius of travel).