Jardins sous la pluie / Gardens in the Rain (12:31)
Claude Debussy and B Mosher
2023
Samples of ultrasonic Plant soundings, and MIDI Score of Estampes Nr.3 (Jardins sous la pluie)
Plants can emit species- and stress-specific ultrasonic sounds that can help us identify plant health. This discovery was published in the March 2023 issue of Cell by researchers at Tel Aviv University and expands our understandings of bioacoustic signalling in plants.
Jardins sous la pluie / Gardens in the Rain samples these sort of ultrasonic sounds, mapping them onto a rendition of Claude Debussy’s Estampes Nr. 3 as played by Katsuhiro Oguri, released in an open source MIDI musical score. In this work a tomato plant’s staccato “blops” sound becomes a chorus of plants blopping out Debussy’s harmonic ode to lush garden rainfall.
To have allow the composition to speak back to plants the melody has been pitched back up to the hypersonic frequencies plants sound in. It also has been pitched down to subsonic frequencies below most human hearing, frequencies which plant roots have been known to relay signals through.