If a seed falls in a forest : sounding out seedbanks to sonify changing climates

Accession Number MELU G113379a lies in a drawer in the archive of the University of Melbourne Herbarium (see Figure 1). G113379a is also known by its generic name Wollemi Pine. Or by its taxonomic name Wollemia Nobilis. Or by its more correct taxonomic category in the family Araucariaceae as it is neither a pine tree nor a member of Pinaceae, the family of pine trees. G113379a has been rendered silent - no creeks and groans of branches swaying back and forth in the wind. No cracking sound of twigs breaking off. No splitting sound of seed pods opening when germinating in the soil. Those sounds are consigned to silence in herbarium and seedbank archives, much like the sound of a tree falling in a forest when no receptors are around. How then can the collections of seed and sound archives be animated, to attune our sensibility toward the fragility and tenacity of species in changing climates? What stories can G113379a speak to - of the species Nobilis and of evolution and extinction at large? And, how may animating a seedbank archive through sound speak to evolution, and its twin, extinction?