Synthesist and composer Anthony Marinelli shared this video, a collaboration with Joe Patitucci of PlantWave, that explores modular improvisation along with sounds triggered through sonification of plants’ electrical conductivity.
PlantWave is a device that connects to a plant’s leaves and measures changes in electrical conductivity. Those fluctuations are translated into MIDI data, which are translated into musical notes, rhythms, and patterns. It’s more sonification of signals you would not normally be aware of, than the plant ‘playing’ music.
Here’s what Marinelli has to say about it:
“In this special session, I’m improvising on the legendary 1969 Moog IIIc “Plantasia” Modular Synthesizer—the same model used on Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia—along with my Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave, while the plants themselves generate melodies through PlantWave.
As PlantWave transforms real-time electrical signals from the plants into beautiful, evolving musical patterns, I’m tuning in, responding, and improvising on the Moog IIIc and 3rd Wave—matching their phrases with my own melodies and rhythms. Every moment emerges organically, completely unique, and impossible to recreate the same way twice.
This is a rare combination of vintage analog synthesis, modern wavetable power, plant-generated musical data, and real-time human improvisation. I hope you enjoy this unique collaboration between nature and machines.”
Didn’t expect Marinelli to be into this scam. The product is a multimeter with an algorithm that interprets random signals into something musical by sonification . It’s like people saying this is the “the sound of space” when they convert light signals to sound with an algorithm. It literally means nothing and is nothing.
Do not pay $300 for this fraud and scam of a product. I expected Marinelli to be more perceptive of these things.
Btw, you can make your own by just using a random source like noise, sample and holding it, quantizing, slewing it. Feel free to make it more musical by patching in more processors in between like attenuators and step sequencers. Congrats! You made your own generative signal processor driven by a random voltage source! 🙂
yes. One can also put two electrodes of a voltage meter into the soil, and get variable voltages. Then call this the sound of mother earth.
The entire universe is electric. Deviating electric fluctuations into synthesiser sounds is as exciting as watching image noise on an old television set. Which is, in fact, fascinating. But meaningless. It is – noise. Different to electronic noise generators, but still noise.
In cosmology and other scientific projects one tries hard to filter all the noise from real data. But some of the synth folks take a bath in this abundance of ignorance. Just let them have their joy. A moment later they will find something other exciting. Completely unrelated to what they have done before. They are children playing in a playground. Aren’t we all only children playing in a playground called earth?
More intresting would be the https://www.instruomodular.com/product/scion/ that give CV and Gate you can feed your Shynts!
And, everyone was sssssooooo worried about AI taking your jobs! Yet, none of you were expecting the “Plants”! We must take them out! Run for your lives!