Musicians are hooking up synthesizers to plants for new sonic possibilities

Users thought it was funny that Stan Smeets stumbled into a meme after posting a video on a synthesizer group.

There is a growing community of people who use various sensors connected to plants and mushrooms as inspiration for synthesized music. The results range from a strange tempo to a fully composed ambient music. They can rack up millions of views.

The plants are not directly making music according to everyone I spoke to. The most common way that they contribute to the process is through the use of electrodes, which measure tiny fluctuations in the electrical current between different areas of the plant. The data can be used to create notes in a certain key.

It is more of an inspiration for others. Smeets matched the leaf patterns seen with the microscopes to different tones using a digital audio workstation. He says that there is never a real song coming out of the plants or the system without a person looping some stuff and fiddling with some stuff.

The leaf structures are playing the notes and the weather sensors are choosing which synthesizer the plants were going to be playing.

Image: Tarun Nayar

A love of the environment is a theme in the community. All of the people I spoke to had a general appreciation for nature, whether it was Smeets finding an unexpected green thumb as a COVID hobby or Fahmi Mursyid, an experimental artist who began getting into plant-based music via soundscape compositions. He started with recordings of an urban forest, and then began to use sensors to get more detailed data from plants. Some of these are uploaded raw, while others are arranged into compositions.

Tarun went through a similar process when he dreamed of building a synthesizer that would take information from the hum of the earth, the winds and the tides. He feels like he is in the early stages of where this is leading him, because he started listening to more ambient music.

The experiment succeeded on TikTok. He started uploading under the name Modern Biology and got a modest following. He uploaded the video on a whim and it has over 25 million views. He was traveling and didn't have a phone signal where he was staying.

He just wants to keep experimenting with environmental music, and going viral isn't his ultimate goal. He recently started a series on flowers and fruit of Hawaii, captured during a recent trip. Sharing is still an important part of the process. People are paying attention to plants and mushrooms. Yes. I'm all about it.

He says that people ask how they might be able to do what he does on TikTok. The creators of the PlantWave, who he knows well, take out a lot of the technical complexity and make it easy to use.

The CEO of Data Garden is a musician and artist. He says that PlantWave is the product of a decade of work. Data Garden was invited to create an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Patitucci designed an algorithm to transform the four plants into a harmony. This is what the PlantWave does. The device connects to an app that allows the user to choose what instruments they want to hear, removing the need to understand synthesizers from the equation. For more advanced users, it can connect up to DAWs.

Image: Joe Patitucci

Everyone I spoke to was open about the plants. Several of them spoke about the connections they made with the plants. Patitucci had a strange but profound experience when he connected to a plant for the first time. I was like, "Woah, wait, was that the plant?" I don't know, but the plant definitely responded to me.

The plants and environment are what these artists find most interesting at installations. When the wind picked up, the music would start to echo. At Patitucci's installations, children would act as if they were charging the plants and their sounds, holding their hands up to them.

Many in the plant music community are experimenting with how much further they can take their inspiration from the environment. I think people are open to that in a way that they haven't been before.