Playlist: Plant Music; A Bio-orchestral experience
Playlist: Plant Music; A Bio-orchestral experience
Interview with Joe Patitucci of Plant Wave
Data Garden, and their newest generation of user-friendly technology known as Plant Wave, employs a system that translates micro fluctuations in electro-conductivity on the surface of a leaf into audio, giving plants a voice. Videos on their website and Instagram feed, demonstrate the many ways people and plants interact via this technological interface. Watch a classroom of children converse with a fern, listen to what happens when a plant is touched, and witness countless musicians co-create music with their house and garden plants. The result is a mesmerizing, interactive sonic experience. Listen below, and then read on for an interview with founder Joe Patitucci.
CHARGE MAGAZINE: Hi Joe! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us! PlantWave is such a unique and fascinating technology! I'm captivated by the use of highly specific digital technologies to facilitate biological, human to plant, interactions. How did this idea get started?
JOE PATITUCCI: There are a lot of angles to this. The big picture is that I started Data Garden as a record label in 2011 with my buddy Alex Tyson, and the record label was all about getting people to connect to nature through electronic music. Originally we were doing this by making and releasing all of our albums in a zero waste way, where all the albums were album covers with a download code on the back and then they had seeds embedded in the albums so you could buy the album and it would grow into flowers.
So that was the original idea for this whole project and it started as Data Garden. To promote the label, we started to do these different events, and everything was about this connection between plants, music and technology. We were always exploring those ideas. In doing so, I became really interested, well, Alex and I both became really interested in the history of electronic music and the history of bio art or people that were using plants in art in different generative ways, and we were interested in plant consciousness studies and things like that. So that’s what lead us to the realization that we could put all that stuff together and create a piece called Data Garden Quartet which would be a way for us to promote our record label. It’s just like making a cool little art instillation where we would have multiple plants playing different instruments and it would all be controlled by these scientific tools that were used to decipher whether plants were conscious or not. So that’s kind of the big picture.
Another way I could answer that question is in terms of my own artistic practice. I was always looking for ways to make music where my inspiration could just be channeled through me without it actually having to move through my fingers. Some people are really good at instruments and they can channel the universe through their fingers, and that is not me. But I would always go out into the woods and connect to nature and connect to a feeling of nature; then go back into the studio and write music from that feeling. I was looking at how I could make music that was inspired by nature but without it having to actually flow through me. What if I could actually have the nature communicate, itself? One of the ways I started to explore that was by making field recordings and finding the melody in the wind and using that melody as the basis for a song and then writing music around it and like in sampling nature literally from a sound perspective, and when we started to think about— when Alex brought me the idea of hooking up plants to synthesizers, then I started to think about how, instead of sampling sound from nature, we could sample data from nature and how I could use that data to express itself as music. So that’s how I developed the compositional process behind Plant Wave, behind a lot of the software that is in Plant Wave. So, that’s kind of how that worked, and it blew my mind, because I didn’t know what it was going to sound like but it sounds like music that I would have wanted to write if I could actually write that music. I don’t have the skills to write that kind of music, but I can develop systems and the plants can write it themselves.
CM: That’s amazing! How does it feel to interact with plants in this way?
JP: The way it feels to me, is that it expands my sense of awareness of the interconnection of all beings. It heightens my sense of awareness of the present moment. It gets me to tune into my relationship between myself and plants, and the relationship between who I am and the energy I am putting out into the world, because plants are responding to energy that we can’t perceive, they are responding to light that we can’t perceive. They are also responding to light that is outside of our spectrum of perception, so some of those things may be things that we’re giving off that we’re not always conscious of but that maybe we can feel. I find that I pay a lot more attention to how I’m feeling when I’m listening to plant music.
CM: It’s very interactive in that way. Can you talk about things you’ve experienced that perhaps were unexpected? What has surprised you along the way?
JP: There have been many people who when they come across a plant music instillation they immediately get it. Somebody may walk into an instillation and just immediately communicate that they notice that the plant is responding to them. There was once a young girl named Melody, she was maybe ten years old, and she walked into the room where plants were playing music, and she looked at her mom and said, “Look Mom, all you have to do is think light coming through your hands and the plant will sing for you.” She was describing this energetic exchange between herself and the plants that was resulting in shifts in music.
I’ve also experienced people walking into a room and suddenly all the music changes. All the patterns from the plants just changing when they walk into the room. I’m kind of blown away by that. And I’ll walk up to the person and I’ll ask them if they notice anything and I tell them what I experienced, and they just say something like, Oh yeah, that makes total sense. I’m an energy healer or I’m a Reiki master. People that have a deep connection to subtle forms of energy or who have cultivated an awareness of subtle forms of energy accept this as a normal part of their reality that a plant would be responding to them. So that for me was really cool. That’s something that has surprised me.
CM: What do you feel are the implications of this kind of technology and this type of experience?
JP: Our users feel more calm when they’re listening to plant music. They feel more connected. They feel more inspired. These are the things that have been reported to us by our users, which is really exciting for us! We all know that spending time in nature makes us feel more relaxed. We feel more connected. So when we have nature in the home, when we have plants in the home, sometimes we aren’t really paying attention to them as much, but they are a way for us to access nature in the home. So, through plant music we’re creating a heightened state. We’re creating an opportunity for heightened awareness of our connection to nature. This allows people to get that same kind of inspiration and refreshment of walking through a forest just by sitting at home and listening. So, that’s one of the implications I see for this technology.
Additionally, the software we’ve built has a lot of applications for wearables and things. We envision creating a soundtrack to your life based on your human biorhythms from wearables. This is a project we’re actively working on.
CM: With all of these projects and ideas, what most excites you at the moment?
JP: At the moment, I’m really excited to be leading breathwork workshops with plant music. I’m excited to hold space for creating experiences, whether they be through plant music or through the healing sessions. I have a really cool project that’s coming up in Europe in late January that I’ll be announcing soon that involves plant music. I’m definitely very excited for the next version of Plant Wave. It’s going to be wireless and allow people to listen to their plants with ease. What I’m most excited about right now is this work; creating a culture where people are encouraged to stop, connect, and listen to nature.