Plants and Sound: A Budding Relationship
It’s 1976, and Canadian composer and producer Mort Garson sits at his Laurel Canyon studio, faced by a wall covered in a mosaic-like collection of switchboards, buttons, and primary-colored wires—a micro-multiverse of atmospheric blips and beeps transcending the human understanding of musicality. Nowadays, it is practically impossible to pinpoint musical projects aimed entirely at an inhuman audience. In this almost exclusive affair, Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia is an ode not to a lover or family but to plants. Drawing inspiration from his gardener wife Peggy’s labor, music for plants would find itself uniquely mainstream.
With cosmic airy tones and bone-rattling vibrational frequencies, Garson constructed this project not through scientific inquiry of what plants like or don’t like to hear, but through a realm of pure imagination. While it’s easy to assume such synthetic frequencies could evoke movement, growth, and perhaps an emotion from a lifeform like this, it begs the question of whether or not plants really respond to this music, or more broadly, if they respond to music at all.
The term “music” is rather broad in a context that examines plant response to different sounds and genres varying in pitch and volume. It is first important to note that no niche, specifically plant niches, is free of sounds around them. With immense amounts of mechano-sensitive channels, researchers have recognized that mechanical and natural vibrations elicit more complex and meaningful reactions than was once believed. And while these truths have been apparent for decades now, whether or not this has any ecological significance remains in the early stages of research.
