Plants account for 80 percent of the total biomass on Earth – and it turns out they are quite musical, too. Image credit: Adam Greig

Plants are essential to our life. They provide us with food, shelter, medicine, and oxygen. Even though we hardly notice it sometimes, plants are living beings; they move, grow, eat, and reproduce. If we pay enough attention, these processes are easy to recognize, no matter how slow they may seem to our eyes.

A less known property of plants is that they are able to produce electric impulses as well. These are not perceptible to humans, but with a little help from modern technology, they can easily be turned into sound, and, surprisingly, music.

Wait, what? Plants can make music? How’s that even possible?

Although plants don’t have nerves, like animals do, they are capable of generating electrical signals. However, scientists are still not sure what their function is. The presence of electrical signals in plants is a known fact since the times of Charles Darwin, but linking these impulses to certain functions still hasn’t reached a consensus within the scientific community.

With the use of biosensing electrodes, we can detect the signals in a plant, just by simply placing the sensors on its leaves, for example. By connecting electrodes to a device, we can amplify the signals, and translate them into sounds. So, we can get a glimpse of what these activities inside the plants may sound like. Simply put, it’s like making organic electronic music.

According to Richard Cahoon, professor of Plant Biology at Cornell University, receiving electric impulses from a plant is not unusual at all; you could find a signal in things that aren’t even alive – the exceptional property of plants is that they can create their own variations that are mostly related to how much water is in a plant. As they photosynthesize, the water within keeps constantly moving around, resulting in variations.

Furthermore, we can even make our own variations of plant music – by touching the plants, for example. Plants react to our touch, because it amplifies the signals they give out. Human touch is not the only thing that can result in the change of pitch or tone of a plant, though; wind, light and other environmental changes have an effect on the variations too.

Different plants can sing louder than others; they may even have a different sound. So making a plant quartet is entirely possible! Connecting different kinds of plants to these special devices will result in a very diverse and pleasant musical experience.

Compositions that are the result of this method sound very eerie and calming. In fact, just as music made by humans, such as jazz or classical music, can have a positive effect on the development of plants, plant music can also have a beneficial effect on people. It can reportedly help with stress reduction, relaxation, and increased creativity.