Artist Gives Plants a Voice

What would plants sound like if you could hear them?

That’s what artist Leslie Garcia set out to discover when she created Pulsu (m) Plantae, a project that uses transducers and amplifiers to allow us to listen to plants. If you think that plants can’t communicate, you’re about to be proven wrong. Plants can respond to touch, sound, and connection to each other—they just speak in a language all their own.

We know that plants have reactions to stimuli. This makes sense when you think about how they respond to air, sun, dirt and water—plants respond to their environment just like any other living thing.

Garcia records the reactions, creating patterns that show us just how the systems of communication work between and within the plants. She’s studied different species of plants, developing a database to code the plants’ responses to stimuli.

The design is based on the philosophy of Felix Guatarri, who coined the idea of Chaosmosis. Chaosmosis is an adaptive response by beings in a random universe. In other words, the plants react to random occurrences in their worlds: a clap, a touch, a connection. This reaction produces an unidentifiable response.

But how can we change that reaction, however undetectable, into something that humans understand? How do we translate plant language into human language? Garcia has an answer for that—she turns these unidentifiable responses into sound. She calls the mechanism that she uses an “audible prosthesis.” This transducer translates the plants’ biological reactions into audible noise.

It’s baffling to watch—Garcia connects petri dishes together with instruments that you might remember from science class when you learned how light bulbs work. Simply switching which dishes are connected to each other changes the sounds that the plants make. This, in particular, is the focus of much of Garcia’s work, as she creates symphonic-­like sounds by simply letting dishes of moss “talk” to each other.

Garcia also prods the plants in the dishes in order to change the sound. The plants can respond to sound a clap, or light, or a lamp being turned on.

Pulsu (m) Plantae will widen your perspective of your environment. Knowing that plants respond to every move you make will allow you to ponder how a blade of grass might react to you stepping on it, or how a tree responds when a gust of wind ruffles its leaves. We might never be able to understand exactly how these actions affect our environments, but now we know that plants do, for lack of a better word, feel.

To watch how Pulsu (m) Plantae works, check out the video below:

Lily's on Twitter - @lilyhiottmillis.

This piece originally appeared on Motherboard which is all about the intersection of technology, science and humans!