Picture strolling through a botanical garden and realising the music around you is being composed by the plants themselves. This weekend, that becomes real at Estepona’s Botanical Orchid Park, where living orchids will turn their own electrical activity into live music and images.
What is this installation?
Called *Escuchar lo invisible* (Listening to the Invisible), the audio visual piece premieres on Sunday, October 25 at 10am. Estepona town hall calls it pioneering and says it will stay in the park permanently, so if you happen to miss the opening morning fear not you can still get to experience the magic.
How do orchids make music?
Orchids do not produce notes in the traditional sense, but they do generate detectable bioelectrical impulses tied to their natural processes and their reactions to light, humidity, temperature and passing visitors. That is how artist and researcher Alejandro Fernandez, who developed the project, explains it.
Sensors fitted to living plants measure these changes continuously. The readings, known as biodata, go to an audiovisual system that converts them into tone, pitch, dynamics, rhythm, density and timbre (the character of a sound).
Each connected orchid feeds its own virtual instrument, so every plant plays a separate musical line. Nothing is pre-recorded. The town hall calls the result a generative composition, meaning the system creates it as it goes, and it never repeats exactly.
Music you can see as well as hear
Visuals will add a second layer. Biodata also moves a central screen, shaping digital particles and 3D models of different orchid species in time with the sound.
Fernandez calls the work “a bridge between biology and aesthetics”, giving visitors a way to perceive a side of plant life that normally goes unseen and unheard.
Make a weekend of it
Estepona’s 11th Orchid and Collector’s Plant Fair runs on Saturday, October 24 and Sunday, October 25, when it will host the premiere. Entry to the stalls outside the park is free, expect carnivorous plants, succulents, South African bulbs and even jewellery made with orchids. Growers from all over Spain sell unusual orchids and collectors’ plants.
Workshops take place inside the park: an introduction to orchids at 11am on both days, and one on carnivorous plants at 5pm on Saturday. You will need an Orchidarium ticket (€5 for adults, €3 for pensioners and people with disabilities) and a reservation, as only 50 seats are available. Book by email at info@orchidariumestepona.com or by phone on 951 51 70 74.
Head to Estepona’s Botanical Orchid Park for a completely different magical experience.