I googled to see if there had been examples of music anywhere remixed by plants. All I found was a lot of Robert Plant and Plant Vs Zombies.

When putting the album My Daughter the Spider together I thought about making some tapes at home. Turns out our tape deck is not up to the task.

After a few experiments at dubbing I accepted that the quality just stank, and abandoned that idea. But then another more interesting thought came along.

What if I played the dodgy audio back through the synth? What if I had a plant also connected to the synth and had it wired up in such a way that it would change the audio coming out? What if I got the plant to do a remix??

The text of Eryk Salvaggio is really useful in helping to understand how this can work:

“Living things produce electrical signals on their surface, whether it’s human skin or the cap of a blooming mushroom [or in this case a photosynthesising plant] . A synthesizer can be designed to read this signal as voltage. The voltage can then control the synthesizer by moving through its components according to a specific structure. The structure is shaped by circuits, which usually assembled and sold as “modules” in a modular synth. The signal’s path between those modules is possible through the patchwork of wiring between those modules. 

The [plant] is not the core of our concern. The centerpiece of this machine is electricity. Once the [plant] “gets into the system,” you can direct it in all kinds of ways, depending on where the wires connect to those modules. If you have never tried to do this, you might assume it’s like hooking up a stereo, where wires have a right place to be. That’s not the case. Instead, you have to make decisions about where the electricity needs to go in order to do the thing you need it to do; every hole in the module is an eligible candidate and there is really no way of knowing what it will do in combinations with other parts of that chain. 

It’s not a sound system. It’s an electrical ecosystem. “Sound” is just what happens afterward.“

The technical Part:

The first module is a bio-feedback module, this converts plants electrical signal in a way that the synth can use. The Synth also has a Loop module, this captures and repeats edits of sound moving through it. The Loop also has a GATE [controlled by the plants electricity] meaning when the biofeedback module is active, the GATE opens and lets a new piece of sound into the looper and deletes the previous sample. And this is where I thought the remix would come form. Not a reinterpretation but a method that a piece of established music could be affected into new and unexpected ways.

And then I started the recording of the remix. I decided once the recording had started that I would not manipulate anything on the synth. I did allow myself to interact with the plant, like touching the plant, spraying water and creating shade. These physical interactions change the signals being sent from the plant to the synth. But it seems like there is no way to control or preempt what the changes might be.

Does it sound any good?

Is it a technique worth exploring?

It’s a fascinating way to apply reimagining to a piece of music via a truely random method. There is no suggestion that the remix is based upon plant-intention or consciousness. It does seem like an interesting result from what Salvaggio calls an Electrical Ecosystem and well worth exploring more.

Below is the remix – have a listen, leave a comment, we’d love to know what you think.