"You're guilty of overproducing. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you."

"Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transposition which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop in the mornings, it naturally affected the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I'd fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony."

-- J. G. Ballard, "Bella Primadonna," 1956.

Perhaps inspired by J. G. Ballard's "Vermilion Sands" stories in which the fictional inhabitants of that Palm Beach-inspired seaside metropolis tickle their audile fancies with sonic flora, David Benque proposes a similar modification of greenery in his 2010 project "Acoustic Botany."

"Singing flower."

As Benque describes, these parasitic bulbous sacs fill with gas, which is released slowly to produce a kind of sound similar to air being let out of a balloon. Like a trumpet, the tension of the membrane and the velocity of the gas passing through the opening creates sounds with various frequencies and volumes.

"Desired traits such as volume, timbre, and harmony are acquired through selective breeding techniques."

Using grafting and selective breeding, Benque proposes a series of flowers, trees, and hybrids that can be arranged in such a way to create a symphonic garden. Unlike Ballard's future-kitschy Tchaikovsky-playing plants that were "popular with the tourists," the intention here is to create a recurring opera of "natural" music, largely dependent on the climate, soil composition, and the musical ambitions of the botanist. (Twelve-tone orchids, anyone?)

I imagine sometime in the future someone being a vintner cultivating melodious vines for aristocratic spectacle and entertainment. We already know there is a market for singing flowers. To get this going we just need the investment of probably millions of dollars for molecular biological research funding. Or the inspired involvement of this guy.

View the rest of Benque's project here.