What does the smallest little bit of frozen moss have to say?

Driving through the North Carolina mountains on the way to a gig, I took some time to hike up to a waterfall just after 5 inches of fresh snow had fallen. I sat for a while at the bottom of the waterfall, listening to the white noise of the rushing water and noticing how many different sounds emerge the longer you pay attention to it. Everything was covered in snow, even the little mosses and lichens on the poplar tree beside me. I decided I wanted to hear what the moss sounded like, freezing there in the wet 20° weather, so I set up my laptop and a PlantWave and recorded it.

The recording I take home on my laptop is very raw, I don't know what the piece will sound like until I get home and start building sounds for the plant to play. This tracks features the moss playing 3 different synthesizers, two samplers playing harmonies I've added to the plant's notes, and the recording of the waterfall I was sitting next to.

I’m releasing this track as a single while I work on producing my next full album, which will be 10 pieces from the rainforests of Puerto Rico. Where should i travel to record next?

What is Plant Music?

This week I released an album of plant music under the name Floraphonics. You may not have heard of plant music before, and that’s because there aren’t many people doing it yet. I use a device called a Plantwave, which has two electrodes that are connected to a plant, usually on the leaves. The device converts electrical waves generated by the plant into MIDI data, musical information that can be played by a synthesizer. You can read more about how it works here.

I’ve spent the last two years playing with this device and it has changed the way I experience plants. I’ve spent whole days listening to my houseplants, traveled all over the country connecting to plants in the wild, and spent time going through the recorded MIDI notes and crafting sounds that fit with the vibe of the plants I’m recording. I’m just starting to learn how to improvise with the plants - playing an instrument along with them in an interactive way. This will be the subject of my next album.

This album is a selection of my houseplants, and one sequoia tree. The first five tracks on the album were recorded in my house, and the 5-10 min pieces are sections of very long recordings, just to give you an overview of what different plants sound like. The last four tracks on the album comprise a 98 min recording of a three-year-old sequoia tree I have planted in my front yard, before, during and after a late afternoon thunderstorm. I have the Plantwave plugged directly into two synthesizers so that I can build and manage the sounds live, with knobs and sliders.

The two synthesizers I used to make the album, a Roland System 8 and a Moog Voyager

You can stream or purchase this record on my Bandcamp page, and the full album will be available on major streaming services after Christmas. I love listening to this music while I work; it’s great ambient background music. I hope you get as much out of listening to plants as I do creating this music! It is enlightening for me to experience other living organisms in this way. Plants are very different from us animals in a lot of ways, but our internal electrical communication works in surprisingly similar ways and exploring this helps me relate to our biosphere in a completely new way.

Let me know what you think about this music, and if you have any ideas of new ways I can implement this technology.