A food forest generates data the way it generates fruit — constantly, seasonally, abundantly. This page is an instrument that plays that data. Nothing here is a recording. Everything is being decided right now, by the weather over one yard in Ormond Beach, Florida.
Every five minutes this page reads the live conditions above the grove. Each measurement owns one dimension of what you see and hear:
The notes live in a pentatonic scale — it can never resolve and never clash, like a forest: always in progress, never finished. Archive this moment saves the frame; no two can ever be identical, because no two hours of weather are.
On-site sensors replace the regional weather feed: soil moisture in every zone, leaf wetness, hive weight, CO₂ — and electrodes on living plants streaming their bioelectric signals as MIDI. The plants stop being the subject of the music and become the players.
A Mac mini in the grove runs an always-on agent that collects every stream, renders one archived piece per day, writes field notes from the data, and answers questions about the forest from anywhere.
Moody Grove itself becomes the venue. Walking the paths with a phone, augmented reality overlays each plant with two layers you can switch between — the science (species, role, harvest, live soil data underfoot) and the experimental (the plant's own signal made visible and audible where you stand). Sitting areas become listening stations where the mix shifts to the plants nearest you.
Remote visitors and on-site wanderers share one system: a visitor here can ask the grove for a note and hear the live plant signal; a visitor on the mulch paths hears remote presences arrive as soft tones in the canopy speakers.
A volumetric capture of the grove, updated seasonally, inhabitable from anywhere: spatial audio places every hive, every bamboo creak, every bird where it actually is; the live data streams re-light and re-weather the space in real time. Sitting in the virtual gathering circle during a real Florida thunderstorm, you hear it arrive from the correct direction.
This piece works inside two traditions. From sound installation it takes the rule of material honesty: everything you hear is either the real place — a field recording made standing in the grove, March 21, 2026, slowed, stretched, opened and closed like a lens — or pure tone shaped by live measurements. Nothing imitates. There are no synthetic birds, no artificial voice; when the grove seems to sing, it is the grove, four times slower.
From bio art — the practice of working with living systems rather than depicting them — it takes its answer to the question of authorship. The weather over one yard in Florida writes the score in real time. The forest recorded itself. The stand you drift through is regrown from the grove's own inventory and photographs, and no hour of it can ever be seen twice, because no hour of weather repeats. Signals travel the mycelium web the way carbon and warning are understood to travel between real trees. The visitor performs; the grove composes; the page only listens.
As the on-site phase arrives — plant biopotentials as MIDI, soil and hive telemetry, the living installation on the grove's own paths — the grove's share of the authorship only grows. The ambition, plainly: not an artwork about a food forest, but a food forest that makes artworks.
Reference points, not affiliations — the practices this piece situates itself among: artists working with real-time environmental data, with data as sensory material, and with living systems as collaborators rather than subjects.
Nathalie Miebach, The Weather Score Project — barometric pressure, wind and temperature woven into sculpture and into musical scores performed by composers. Andrea Polli, Sonic Antarctica — atmospheric and climate-data sonification developed with NASA and NCAR scientists.
Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics / test pattern — the austere discipline of mapping raw data onto synchronized sound and image.
David Dunn, The Sound of Light in Trees — bioacoustic recordings from inside living pines. Data Garden / Joe Patitucci, PlantWave — plant electrical activity rendered as real-time generative music.
Saša Spačal, Myconnect (2013, with Švagelj & Podgornik) — installations built with living fungal and microbial systems as co-agents. Špela Petrič — plant–human intimacy protocols.
Janet Cardiff (audio walks), Bill Fontana (relocated live soundscapes), William Basinski (The Disintegration Loops), Éliane Radigue (slow-tone physicality) — the traditions behind the rule of only the real recording or pure tone.
Suzanne Simard's mycorrhizal-network research informs the mycelium visuals — presented as an artistic rendering of a generative idea, not a scientific claim; its strongest forms are the subject of active debate (Karst et al., 2023).
Named for orientation and honest lineage — no affiliation or endorsement is implied.
How it's built. The forest is a true 3-D point field — every particle carries an (x, y, z) position and is projected to the 2-D canvas each frame through a perspective divide, so drifting through the stand is real camera translation in z, not a parallax trick. Species and their proportions are read at load from grove_data.json, the same registry the documentation site uses.
The sound is a single Web Audio graph: drone voices and event sounds route through HRTF PannerNodes for binaural spatialization, a convolver for room, and a master EQ that lifts low warmth and cuts the 2–5 kHz "alarm band" so long listening stays calm; all pitch material is a fixed major pentatonic. Body Mode turns the webcam into a motion sensor via an 8×6 frame-difference grid computed entirely on-device — no image ever leaves the browser — feeding one calm↔build parameter that also joins the wind. It runs continuously in a single HTML file with no server.
Every moment a visitor chooses to keep is added here — each one a frame of the grove under a weather that will never recur. No two are the same.
A living portrait, generated from this hour's real weather over the food forest — and twelve field notes hidden inside it. Chase the gold glimmers to uncover the grove's data and secrets. The deeper you go, the more the field changes.