The Biological Basis For Music

"Nature is imagination itself" - exploring music composition via biosonification, bioelectrical music, nature-connectedness. Supporting The Earth as a co-composer.

In my first Substack article, I stated the intention of exploring the ‘ecological and biological basis for music’ through A State Of Flo. In this article, I start to lay out my thinking behind this ambition, focussing on ‘plant music’, specifically via a process that I like to refer to as ‘biosonification’ but perhaps is more commonly known as ‘bioelectrical music’. 

Every living thing conducts electricity and for the past 40 years, musicians and artists have used a variety of means to convert the electrical signals of plant life into musical notes as a means of composition and connecting to nature. Plant Music is not a new phenomenon - artists such as Michael Allen Z Prime have been working in this way since the 1980’s and the internet meme-fuelled popularity of devices such as PlantWave, which claims to help you ‘listen to the music of plants’, has helped this way of connecting with nature through sound and electricity enter a more mainstream consciousness. In the current day, artists including London-based Natural Symphony, Jason Singh and Alice Boyd, Canada’s Taruntspoon aka Modern Biology and Brussels-based Pauline Mikó aka PLUIES have all used this means of composition at the core of their work. One thing is guaranteed - there will be a lot more in the future.

A few years ago, I bought one of the first PlantWave devices, allowing me to step into this bioelectrical world and have subsequently used it for a range of sonic art and well-being projects. PlantWave uses two electrodes which can be connected to any living thing (plant, human, fungi, whatever) to complete a circuit and tiny changes in electrical voltage are converted to musical notes, or MIDI. PlantWave offers a mobile app that has a range of preset sounds that will play calming music ‘generated by the plant’. From a more creative standpoint, It also has a feature to bypass the preset sounds and instead root it into whatever MIDI synthesizer or drum machine one would like.

Here are some examples… 

I’ve used it across several projects in the past few years, starting with a vertical farming installation for Dandelion, which installed huge vertical farm boxes or as they called them ‘Cubes of Perpetual Light’ to remote locations across Scotland.

It was designed to help inspire people to ‘grow your own’ and think more about the natural resources we have at our fingertips. My piece featured herbs from my own garden - basil, sage, lavender, mint to create a ‘symphony of interchanging sounds’. 

Last year, I used this approach for a multi-speaker sound installation in ‘The Balance Garden’ - a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, where I worked with urban garden company Wild City Studios. My idea was that every plant would have its own soundscape but the individual sounds that each plant made would come together in harmony as part of the overarching garden soundscape.

I then biosonified fungi for Glastonbury’s Silver Hayes Pavilion. A structure built entirely out of mushroom’s. My 15 minute fungi piece was played on loop for 5 days throughout the festival. (More on this coming soon…)

I also worked for Jagermeister to help create individual bio-sonified soundtracks for the winning cocktails in their annual cocktail competition. I captured the ingredients of each cocktail and combined them into the soundscape in the style and personality of the drink.

I’ve got a new installation coming in Miami, with an urban garden focussing on the movements of butterflies - will share more when the project is launched.

Why is this important?  “Nature is imagination itself”

We live in a world that is hierarchical, humans at the top and everything else below. But once we start peeling back the layers, we find human exceptionalism is overstated and that plants, fungi and animals are far more intelligent than we often give them credit for. 

The discipline of ecoacoustics teaches us that the natural soundscape is an “interface” (watch Prof Alice Eldridge explain more here) that we can listen to and learn much from. In James Bridle’s fantastic book ‘Ways Of Being’, he writes how comparing human intelligence with plant intelligence by using the same metrics is a misstep, and since the days of Aristotle that poor conceptual framing has driven a wedge between humans and the natural world. Bridle cites this quote from William Blake to sum this sentiment up:

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself”

– William Blake, 1799

Bridle’s explanation of the German ‘umwelt’ concept is also useful here - explaining that all living things have their own ecosystems, physically determined by their comparatively limited world-view, and their intelligence and ways of communicating are entirely based around those boundaries, which therefore demands far more credit. He also writes about how modern human technologies (AI included) often fail to understand their own wider ecology, but by doing so they can start integrating better into an interdependent ecosystem functioning in solidarity with the environment. 

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the influential Brazilian thinker, coined the term ‘Terrans’ as a way of describing some people, identifying them as terrestrials – dwellers of the earth, much the same as any flora or fauna as distinct from ‘Humans’, which is a group which distinguishes itself from other lifeforms so that they may trample over them more easily.

In my opinion, biosonfication gets us closer to nature: as a composer it allows me to work in symbiosis with the plant in a kind of duet. As a listener, we gain insight into the living, breathing, communicating world around us that we often overlook. However, it is worth noting that Monica Gagliano expresses concern over the hype around biosonification in her book ‘Thus Spoke the Plant’, citing that it undervalues the depth and breadth of plant communication by reducing everything down to merely electricity, which all living things commonly share. As we’ll explore in future posts and projects, biosonfication is just one way to improve our nature connectedness but there are plenty of others… 

Earth as a co-composer

I will seek to explore those in future posts, but in the interests of brevity I’d like to conclude by introducing the third core pillar of what A State Of Flo is all about. As I seek to forge a deeper connection with the natural world, 10% of all revenue will be donated to Brian Eno’s charity Earth Percent. I’ve been working with them for over a year and was particularly drawn to their concept of the ‘Earth as a composer’, where an artist releasing music can attribute ‘The Earth’ as one of the composers on the track and therefore the Earth (via a variety of climate charity partners) will start to receive royalties and compensation for its role in the music. I look forward to seeing how this model develops over the coming months and will be fully utilising it with all the releases on A State Of Flo (which will be announced very soon…)