Graphic Scores for Plant Voices
Created at Volovan Sound Residency in Portugal, July 2026
©julianaespanakeller
IMAGE 01: A SHIMMERING WITH PLANTS
A graphic score for a single plant — six movements tracing a life-cycle from root to seed, using notation gestures (drone lines, tremolo shimmer, aleatoric scatter, breath marks) rather than standard notes. Fits the sonic intra-active vocabulary of shimmer and diffraction.
Six movements, root to dormancy — each uses a distinct gesture (drone, glissando, tremolo cluster, aleatoric scatter, bloom burst, fading dashes) rather than fixed pitches, so it stays open to intra-active reading rather than fixed reproduction.
IMAGE 02: STORED WATER, HELD BREATH
A graphic score for a cactus in six movements: for voice, contact-mic'd body and hand percussion.
Cactus logic is inverted from a leafy plant's: mostly restraint (long silences, drought stillness) punctuated by sharp percussive spine-clicks, a slow water-storage pulse, radiant heat shimmer, and one brief fortissimo bloom before sealing shut again.
IMAGE 03: CRACK, BLOOM, SCATTER
A graphic score for a dandelion in six movements for voice, found metal and breath. The dandelion runs on a faster, scrappier clock than the others — pushing up through a crack, one loud unguarded sunburst chord, a nightly closing-and-reopening that repeats before the piece moves on, fragile seed-head harmonics held in stillness, then a single shared exhale that scatters every voice in a different direction. Ends on a bare stem, not a resolution.
IMAGE 04: UNFURLING HELD THORN
The rose flower's logic is coiled tension released outward: a trembling bud, defensive thorn-strikes, a widening spiral glissando for the unfurl, whispered fragrance tones, one dense sustained chord at full bloom, then single falling notes as it fades — thorn-guard persisting even after the bloom is gone.
IMAGE 05: SHED BARK, HELD FIRE
A graphic score for a Eucalyptus tree in six movements. This one centers on the tree's fire ecology: a dormant lignotuber holding banked energy underground, long peeling bark-ribbon scrapes, a volatile rising oil-haze tone, dry stiff-leaf clatter, a violent fortissimo ignition where seed capsules split open, and faint new pitches emerging from a blackened trunk line — regrowth built into the score rather than treated as an epilogue.
IMAGE 06: TURBID WATER, MADE CLEAR
A graphic score for a Moringa Tree (Moringa Oleifera) in six movements for voice, seed rattles and water vessel. The moringa gives me a gesture none of the others have of crushed moringa seeds in a mortar and pestle that are used to purify turbid water — noise literally clarifying into a pure tone. That becomes the signature movement.
IMAGE 07: PERFORATED LIGHT, BLOOD OF ST. JOHN
A graphic score for St. Johns Wort (Hypericum perforatum) in six movements for voice, bowed light and metal. This score leans into the plant's specific lore rather than just its shape: the leaf's translucent gland-dots as pinpricks of light-tone, the exact five-pointed star chord of the bloom, a sudden rupture into a "bleeding" dissonant cluster for the hypericin stain when crushed, and a protective doubled drone for its apotropaic use at midsummer thresholds.
IMAGE 08: SIX SPECTOGRAMS: A SHIMMERING WITH PLANTS
The frequency-time synthesis for all six scores indicating: one spectrogram panel per piece, each built directly from that score's notation logic rather than random noise:
- Plant: low drone → rising glissando ridge → high tremolo scatter → broadband rustle → sudden broadband bloom → decaying fade
- Cactus: near-silence → sparse spine-clicks → pulsing low band (water) → wavering high tone (heat) → one loud broadband burst (night bloom) → fade to floor
- Rose: tight high vibrato (bud) → sparse thorn-clicks → rising glissando (unfurl) → soft high noise (fragrance) → dense harmonic stack (full bloom) → diverging thin lines (petal fall)
- Dandelion: low grind rising to a thin line → bright harmonic stack (bloom) → narrowing fading bands (dusk) → sparse high dots (seed head) → burst + scattering lines (wind) → near-silence
- St. John's Wort: quiet drone → high pinprick dots → 5-line harmonic chord → sharp burst + dissonant cluster (bruised) → doubled low drone (warding) → sparse faint dots (dried)
- Eucalyptus: pulsing low band (lignotuber) → broadband scrape (bark) → wavering mid tone (oil) → sparse dots (wind rattle) → violent full-spectrum burst (ignition) → diverging lines over decaying low fade (regrowth)
Colored on an inferno scale with a log frequency axis, so it reads like a real spectrogram even though it's a sonic translation of the graphic notation rather than an actual recording — worth noting clearly if this goes anywhere as textual matter, it is interpretive, not empirical data.
IMAGE 09: TURBID WATER, MADE CLEAR//WAVEFORM & PATCH
Turbid Water, Made Clear — a graphic score plus matching waveform/patch panel, both built around what makes the moringa plant distinct:
Six movements. I. Taproot Plunge — one fast, steep descending glissando (moringa races downward before it races up). II. Feathered Flush — paired grace-notes multiplying, mirroring the tiny tripinnate leaflets that flush faster than seems possible. III. White Flower Hum — a close-interval honeyed cluster with a loose-lip bee-buzz undertone. IV. Drumstick Rattle — the long pods shaken, seeds knocking in a swaying woody rhythm. V. Seed Clarification — the signature: wide unpitched murk gradually settling until only one clear tone remains, drawn as a turbid band narrowing to a single blue line. VI. Drought Shed — moringa drops its leaves rather than dying: soft tones released and not retrieved, ending on one small bright new note.
The patch. Movement V is the interesting one on a modular system: a wet/dry crossfade where a noise source fades out exactly as a single VCO fades in — the water clearing rendered as literal signal purification. The rest: a one-gate exponential fall for the taproot, S&H paired grace-clicks, a three-oscillator cluster with a soft square buzz, a sway LFO gating the rattle clicks, and a short sequence of dropped notes closing on one fresh voice.
If the clarification gesture resonates in a live performance, it might be worth a WAV render — that crossfade is the kind of thing that's more convincing heard than seen.
IMAGE 10: SIX WAVEFORMS//MODULAR SYNTHESIS RENDERINGS
Six stacked waveform panels — actual synthesized time-domain amplitude, not sketches — with each movement labeled above and a modular patch suggestion in monospace below (the module chain that would produce that gesture on a Eurorack-style system):
- Plant — swelling LFO-modulated sine drone → exponential VCO glissando → fast-tremolo shimmer → gusting filtered noise → sudden three-oscillator chord → long decay envelope
- Cactus — mostly a flat line (VCA closed) with rare S&H blips, sharp pinged-filter spine clicks, a square-LFO gated water pulse, rising-depth vibrato, then one violent snap-envelope burst
- Rose — tight shallow tremolo held small, irregular strikes, a widening swept glissando, breathing filtered noise, the densest harmonic stack of the set, then discrete falling oscillator drops
- Dandelion — noise grind breaking into a rising tone, immediate full four-VCO chord, a closing LFO squeezing the VCA at dusk, near-silent high partials, one noise-burst exhale scattering into seven independently drifting oscillators, then a closed VCA
- St. John's Wort — quiet tremor, S&H pinprick pings, a five-oscillator chord at exact ratios, one noise strike collapsing into a beating dissonant cluster (89/93/101 Hz — the "bruise" is literal amplitude beating), doubled detuned drone, faint fixed pitches
- Eucalyptus — gated low pulses, sustained scraping noise, a deep-vibrato thinning tone, dry S&H rattles, a full-spectrum roar at ignition, then a new voice rising out of the decaying ember tone
The waveform view reveals things the spectrograms hide: how much of the cactus is genuinely empty, how the dandelion front-loads its energy while the eucalyptus back-loads it, and the visible beating in the St. John's Wort bruise cluster.