Avocado Grove Sonification Artist Statement I. The Grove This work begins in an old-growth grove of Hass avocado trees — some of the oldest producing trees of their kind still standing. The Hass avocado traces back to a single tree, grown from a seed by mail carrier and amateur horticulturist Rudolph Hass in La Habra Heights, California, in the early 1920s. Hass had intended to graft a different variety onto his seedling rootstock, but the graft failed to take. Rather than remove the stubborn seedling, he let it grow. The fruit it eventually produced — thicker-skinned, richer, more durable in shipping than the varieties then in commercial use — was patented in 1935. That single "mother tree" lived for roughly 76 years before succumbing to root rot and being removed in 2002. Nearly every Hass avocado eaten anywhere in the world today is a cutting, grafted from a lineage that runs back to that one accidental seedling. In that sense, a Hass avocado grove is a kind of clone colony — one organism, endlessly repeated, planted into new ground, decade after decade. The grove used for this piece belongs to that lineage, but it has been left to grow old — root systems undisturbed, soil unturned, canopy left to close in on itself for far longer than most commercial orchards are permitted to stand. Old growth, in this context, is rare. II. What Happens Underground Trees are not solitary. Beneath any grove old enough to have found its own equilibrium, root systems are laced together by mycorrhizal fungi — threads finer than root hairs that connect one tree to another, and often one species to another, across the entire stand. Through this shared fungal network, trees exchange carbon, nitrogen, and water; a shaded seedling can be subsidized by a mature tree many meters away. Roots also generate small electrical potentials as they grow, respond to injury, and interact with soil chemistry and moisture — a slow, ongoing electrical conversation running just beneath the surface of the ground. Layered into this is an entire underground weather system: aerobic microbes respiring and multiplying in pulses tied to moisture and temperature, earthworms moving through the soil column and aerating it as they go, gases rising and falling with decay and root activity, water migrating along gradients invisible from above. None of this is static. It behaves, over the course of a season, something like a climate — its own interlocking system of inputs and feedback, entirely indifferent to whether anyone is listening. We are not built to sense any of this. It happens too slowly, too quietly, in a medium — soil — that we cannot see into. It has been there the entire time we have walked past it. III. Bringing It to This Plane For several weeks, a network of sensors was buried and threaded through the grove, recording what the trees and the ground beneath them were doing: temperature, aerobic microbial activity, worm movement, moisture, decay, gas concentration, and ultrasound. The result is a set of long, layered data streams — a record of a world that has no voice of its own. That data now drives a no-input mixer: an audio mixing network wired so that every output feeds back into every input, with no external sound source of its own. Left alone, such a system produces only self-generated feedback — it needs something to steer it. Here, that steering is done entirely by the grove. Each data stream — fast or nearly still, depending on what it is measuring — becomes a control signal, routing and re-routing the mixer's own feedback through itself, pushing some paths closed and others wide open, second by second, hour by hour, at whatever pace the trees and soil actually moved. No human hand plays this system. No score was written for it. The composition is the grove's own record of itself, translated into voltage and routed through a machine built only to reflect sound back on itself. IV. What You Will Hear The no-input mixer exists as software, built with a visualization layered on top of it, so the routing can be watched as well as heard — a way to follow which stream is speaking at any given moment, and to see the feedback find its own path through the network in real time. Some of what feeds it was measured directly: temperature is temperature, recorded as it happened. Much of the rest is evidence rather than the event itself — we cannot record a microbe growing, only the gas its growth leaves behind; not a root's decision, but the trace it left in the soil. And a great deal of it only becomes legible at all once observed over weeks — patterns that mean nothing in a moment and everything across a season. Compressing that long, slow time into something audible in minutes was one of my central interventions: not inventing a sound, but finding the speed at which the grove's own story could finally be heard. The first time I listened to the finished network, I was startled by how much variety was in it. I had not expected a grove to sound like this. Listen for the friction between the organic and the synthetic: passages that resemble crickets, coyotes, wind, or rain, sitting alongside long tonal drones, sudden gated bursts, and textures with no clear source at all. Some movements unfold at the pace of microbial bloom; others shift as fast as a worm reacting to disturbed soil. Most unexpected of all was what happened when the feedback began folding back on itself, fractally, layer feeding layer — the results, rather than turning harsh or mechanical, became remarkably natural. What you are hearing was never intended to be heard. It is the electrical and biological correspondence of an old-growth avocado grove, made audible for the first time — the underground, finally admitted onto our plane of existence.