An orchestra from the comfort of your garden chair - did you know plants make music?

By James Chater 

Photograph: © TFL from the London Transport Museum Collection

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… No, not bears picnicking, but something perhaps as equally far-fetched. Plants that make music.

To me, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show means one thing; being subjected to an hour-long programme every evening for a week about gardens. Unfortunately, I can’t get much more excited about it than that, despite my mother’s consistently enthused accounts of the many wonderful gardens she has seen during the day. However, this time she returned with an anecdote that didn’t cause me to reach hurriedly for my noise-cancelling headphones. The anecdote was about a stall she had seen where an array of plants were, thanks to a complicated looking contraption, creating music. Music is an art that has associations with many other arts, social sciences and general hobbies but, I must admit, I had never seen horticulture as one of them. Sceptically, I began to investigate and was pleasantly surprised by the large quantity of information on a field of research I had never encountered.

The research has been centred in the Italian ‘eco-village’ of Damanhur. In 1979, 11 ‘Damanhurians’ founded the self-titled ‘Federation of Damanhur’, in an Italian mountain range 30 miles from Turin in 1979. Today, the site is known as the location of the ‘Temples of Humankind’, an enormous temple made up of several halls some 100ft beneath the mountain. It was constructed in complete secrecy from the Italian government, and without heavy construction machinery. It has to be seen to be believed. Since 1979, a team of scientists has been working to ascertain whether it is possible to communicate with plants, and whether the communication can be through the medium of music. One fascinating experiment has given real traction to the idea that plants can in fact communicate with each other. 

Capiscum Annuum

Until now it has been thought that the ways in which plants communicate was through chemical or magnetic means, but the team at Damanhur have shown that they may be able to through sound as well, just at a frequency inaudible to humans. 

“In the experiment, Capsicum annuum (chili pepper) seeds isolated in a black box that blocked all possible chemical and magnetic communication, germinated slowly when there were no other plants nearby; they did so at a normal speed if they were near other Capsicums, and did so rapidly if they were near basil plants, known to be their natural ally. Growth was even faster if there were fennel plants nearby, since fennel is antagonistic to Capsicum plants, releasing chemicals that would slow their growth. Fennel seemed to signal its presence with a kind of acoustic communication. If it was put in a plastic box that blocked all forms of chemical communication, nearby Capsicum plants were spurred into growing much faster than normal.”

How then are these sounds made audible? Electrodes are attached to the roots and the leaves, through which vibrations are sent as a MIDI signal to a synthesiser, which then plays the notes. Differences in electric potential within the roots and leaves cause changes in pitch and rhythm. The result is quite extraordinary.

However, the question that arises is whether, even if the plant creates these sounds, it necessarily becomes music. If they are sounds that are the result of a biological change in the plant’s surroundings, there isn’t much that differentiates it from human speech; it is functional. Not many people would label a conversation as music, apart from maybe John Cage. In a sense, to be called music, there needs to be evidence that the plant makes these sounds spontaneously, ‘for fun’, if you will.

Photograph: © NOTCOT

Damanhur has the answer… “Countless tests and re-workings of the basic technology have refined this device [the device which changes the signals into sound]. These forty years of experimentation seem to tell us that plants realise that it is they who are determining the sequence of notes emitted by the device, and therefore they modulate it intentionally. They do not just react to stimuli from their surroundings but can be ‘trained’ to use the device increasingly well, to respond to the human voice or to someone playing an instrument. Plants ‘remember’ their training, and over time learn to interact in an ever more sophisticated way with their audience.”

So there you have it, a brief introduction to the musical world of plants. I have only scratched the surface here, and if you would like to find out more there is a whole website dedicated to this field of research, an album compiled by Damanhur of different plants’ ‘songs’, and even the opportunity to go and see the ‘plant concerts’ first-hand. The device that creates the sounds is even on sale to the general public. So forget Beethoven, you could soon be conducting your very own orchestra from the comfort of your garden chair.

Southern Sinfonia is very excited about the final of our Newbury Young Musician of the Year Competition; click here to find out more and purchase tickets. 

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