Plant Sounds Music

[Enrichetta]

Plantmusic is a way of monitoring electrical signals of plants as sound. Through patented sonification technology, PlantWave measures biological changes within plants, graphs them as a wave and translates the wave into pitch.

The music sounds, at first, like it belongs in a power yoga studio: electronic and rhythmic, rising and falling like breaths. But then a higher pitch juts into the mix, and the strains of sound diverge, becoming faster-paced and a bit more like electronic dance music. The rise and swell fluctuates, not entirely predictable. The artists at work are, ostensibly, plants: a philodendron, two schefflera and a snake plant.

Now, through bio-sonification devices like Music of the Plants and PlantWave, plant enthusiasts can open channels of communication with their plants, conducted in the trending language of ambient noise. The plants can speak "ambient chill," it turns out. Er, right?

PlantWave grew out of a zero-waste record label called Data Garden, started by Joe Patitucci and Alex Tyson in 2011. Data Garden produced digital albums, partially distributed via download codes printed on artwork that was embedded with plantable flower seeds, as well as installations and interactive exhibitions that combined plants, music and technology. In 2012, an early iteration of PlantWave was born when the Philadelphia Museum of Art invited the label to do an installation at the museum. Data Garden worked with an engineer, Sam Cusumano, to develop a device that translated micro-conductivity on the surface of plants into a graph that could be used to control hardware and software synthesizers. The result was "Data Garden Quartet," featuring four harmonizing plants that played continuous music. After that, Patitucci and Tyson wanted to create a commercially available version for musicians and plant lovers; the first iteration sold out, and a new and improved model, funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign, will be released in the near future.

Patitucci said that at Data Garden, they try to stay away from anthropomorphizing the plants too much. "I think that a lot of times when people think of plant music, when they first hear of it, they think, will it sound like death metal in this case or classical music in this other case? Will it tell you if it's mad at you or sad?" he said. "It's really important to understand that these are beings that are living in another dimension." This is a paradox of sorts about plant music: the imposition of a human scale and pitch allows us to be more aware that plants are living, but it might make us think they feel like us, even when they don't.

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So, plants hear and make sounds therefore sounds affect the plants. Research has shown that gentle music around 115-250 Hz stimulates growth in plants that use light to photosynthesise. And also, that the optimum is 3 hours a day, more than that the plants get exhausted. Smithsonian and NASA show that mild vibrations increase growth in plants, while harsher, stronger vibrations have a negative effect. Why? the vibrations open the stomata, create more RNA (improves communication), improved photosynthesis, and much more, which all improve photosynthesis and the ability to fight infection... you could say the plants are happy!

Dominique we saw in the news the other week that there are devices that are capable of converting the electrical conductivity of houseplants into audio, giving plants the chance to sing. Pretty crazy! Can you dive into how and why the vibrations or songs our plants are singing change throughout the day?

So, if we put all this together and look at the benefit to us. Healthy plants means healthy people, we are connected nature and when there are plants in our home our physical and mental wellbeing improves. But the research is confusing we looked at 101 studies including the NASA research each looked at different plants, indifferent contexts, with different types of spaces and different research methods. We summarised these into two equations one measuring the wellbeing benefits of plants from a psychological perspective and one from an indoor air quality perspective. These were then put into the Plant Life Balance app where you can look at each room at home, interactively design in the plants you like to give you the best health outcomes. -app/

Mlodie Fenez is a French artist who claims she has discovered a way to harness plant sounds and turn them into music. When I first heard about her, I was intrigued and reminded of Vclav Hlek, the mushroom composer, who recently passed away. I headed over to her home in Berlin to give it a listen.

Fenez began by poking the naked ends of wires into the leaves of the plants that fill her apartment. Then she handed me a pair of headphones with a cord snaking back to a control panel beneath her fingers. The panel itself was a modified children's toy covered in pictures of farm animals. It used to make barnyard sounds, before Fenez hacked it into an interface between her and the plants. With a deft hand, she began to play the children's toy. Otherworldly clicks, whistles, and wails filled my ears.

If you find yourself in Turin, Italy, you might want to take a field trip to the eco-commune of Damanhur. There you can see the 11-story temple it took the 1,000 residents 16 years to build by hand, inspired by a falling star envisioned by the community's leader Oberto Aiuradi (who goes by Falco). You might also want to catch a singing plant concert, wherein sensors attached to the leaves of plants translate some of their biological processes into synthesizer music.

That's essentially been the party line on plants for most of recorded history. But then there was that period during the 1970s when Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's book "The Secret Life of Plants" made The New York Times best-seller list. The book was chock-full of dubious science experiments: teaching cacti to count and giving houseplants lie detector tests that resulted in the needle of the machine going haywire when a shrimp was boiled alive in its presence, or when a person the plant didn't trust entered the room. There was a lot of talk of "energy fields" and "rays" of one kind or another. But although scientific researchers didn't take the book seriously, and many considered it to have set plant research back a few hundred years, it encouraged the general public to consider plants in ways we never had before.

But with singing plants, we come up against the same kind of questions Tompkins and Bird attempted to answer, albiet using flagrantly unscientific methods. What is the truth about plants? How do they make sense the world? How do they communicate with each other and respond to the myriad of variables their environments throw at them? For a group of organisms that makes up around 99 percent of the biomass on this planet, we actually have very few answers to any of these questions. It's true, the secret life of plants is probably much richer and more complicated than we think. But are plants constantly producing the type of ambient music you normally hear in a day spa?

Dr. Ratnesh Mishra, a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Functional Plant Biology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, says in an email interview that the sound we hear as synthesizer music at a "plant concert" at Damanhur comes from movement inside the plant during the cavitation process where air bubbles are sucked up through the body of the plant, especially when water is scarce. It's like having a machine that turns sucking the dregs of your milkshake up through a straw into synthesizer noise.

One of Gagliano's experiments involves testing how pea plants in dry soil "listen for" and respond to the vibration of moving water. Another study found the roots of young corn plants make "clicking sounds" of around 220 Hz, and respond to clicking sounds emitted at the same frequency.

Botanical Resonance includes three contemporary artists who were commissioned to create artwork installations that interpret sound in several different ways: two soundwalks by Annika Kappner, an immersive quilt installation by Brooke Erin Goldstein, and an immersive sound installation by St. Louis artist Kevin Harris.

Soundmaking is an ancient human practice and art, with the use of plants integral to music and other sounds made in cultures around the world. Sounds are made by vibrations causing soundwaves that humans sense either through their ear canals or through their bodies. These vibrations are also made by living things in many environments, including insects and animals. Ancient depictions of humans playing instruments often feature flutes made from reeds or drums fashioned from wood. The earliest extant examples of human musical instruments are flutes made from bone, as plant material decays quickly and is rarely found in archaeological excavations unless preserved in some other way (charred or sealed in hermetic environments).

Pitch, or frequency, of sound is measured by how much a sound wave fluctuates, which is measured in hertz (Hz); the more fluctuations per second, the higher the frequency. Humans can hear a range from a very low 20 Hz to a very high 20,000 Hz, but those ranges change depending on age and other factors. Sound intensity is measured by loudness, or amplitude, or decibels (dB); prolonged exposure to loud sounds can be difficult for a human ear to tolerate and can cause hearing loss. The most difficult element of sound to describe is the timbre, or tone or quality of a sound; timbre depends on the form of the sound wave, which can be smooth or complex.

Plants are used to make a wide variety of instruments, including woodwinds, stringed, and percussion instruments. Woodwinds are a type of aerophone instrument, where a vibrating mass of air is used to produce the musical sound, such as flutes, clarinets and oboes, and recorders. Chordophones are stringed instruments, such as guitars, violins, cellos, and ukuleles. Idiophones are instruments of which their whole body is used to produce a sound, including being struck, shaken, or scraped; thumb pianos, maracas, shakers, and xylophones are idiophones. Drums are membranophones, in which a sound is produced by vibrating a stretched membrane, either with sticks or hands.

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