What is Plant Music: When Artists and Nature Play

00:01
Joe Patitucci
Welcome to the Nature of Now podcast. I'm your host, Joe Patitucci. On this show, we'll explore the intersection of consciousness, creativity, and the natural world. We'll dive into the mysteries of existence, perception, and how thoughts and intentions shape the world around us. Each episode features insightful discussions with pioneering artists, scientists, philosophers, and spiritual teachers who share their unique perspectives on how their works come into being. Nature of now is here to awaken curiosity and inspire your imagination. Through heart centered conversations that ignite our inner creative spark. Together, through wonder and curiosity, we'll discover how in every moment, the universe is calling us into new lessons, one breath and one insight at a time. So let's embark on this adventure together as we reveal the nature of now, where consciousness becomes form. This episode is brought to you by Plantwave. 

00:59
Joe Patitucci
Plantwave turns a plant's biorhythms into music. You just attach two sensors to a plant's leaves. Plantwave connects wirelessly to a mobile device running the Plantwave app. And the app has instruments on it that are built for plants to play. Check it out@plantwave.com and share it with your friends. 

01:17
Joe Patitucci
Hey everyone, thanks for coming out. My name is Joe and this is the what is Plant music conscious conversation. And I have with me here Brian Noel. 

01:33
Bryan Noll
Hello. 

01:34
Joe Patitucci
Andrea Cortez. 

01:36
Andre Cortez
Hello. 

01:37
Joe Patitucci
And Galani. And we all make music with plants and we use a device called Plantwave, which I developed with my team at Datagarden. And I'll give you a quick snapshot of what the tech does, and then we're going to talk a little bit about our individual artistic practices and how we approach designing with plants and collaborating with plants. So Plantwave is the device that connects to plants, and it reads these slight changes in conductivity through the leaves. It's mostly a measure of how much water is moving between two points in the plant. And we're graphing that over time, translating it into a wave and translating that into pitch, and routing pitch messages to different instruments that we design. So the plant wave product, you can check it out in the expo over here. We also have a plant music lounge upstairs in eleven B. 

02:41
Joe Patitucci
It's like a space about this size with musical plants. They're all playing different instruments. It's a really great place to chill out and recharge. It is like, I would say, maybe the most special place here this week. I'm a little biased, so take that for what it's worth. Yeah, so that's basically how that works. And we have a consumer product that anyone can use. You can take a plant wave home, and you can connect it to your own plants. And we have an app that has all the instruments on it. So we're going to go deep into kind of the design process for us. But just know this is an experience you can have at home in a really easy to use plug and play, kind of. So I'll just start. 

03:30
Joe Patitucci
So the way I design plant music is really just as more of a monitoring device. But we're going to talk more about performance. So again, I'm Joe. I'm going to pass it down and we're going to do little intros just on who we are and what we do. 

03:47
Bryan Noll
So, yeah, really, Joe just brought up something about collaboration, and I think that's probably the most interesting thing about plant wave. As Lightbath, the artist's name that I use. I see collaboration as one of the biggest parts of my process, whether I'm collaborating with a modular synthesizer. Say I'm not using plant wave, right? And it's just a modular synthesizer. I set up systems in this synthesizer that make it feel like I'm playing with another musician. It gives me surprises. It's not just playing sequences and things that I've prepared. In fact, it's very often unprepared. So unprepared, like my performance yesterday, that I didn't know what I was going to do. It's just completely improvised, but that keeps it fresh and it keeps it new. 

04:38
Bryan Noll
And what's really interesting is when you integrate with something like plant wave, that it's sometimes almost too surprising in my own process. So I had hooked up to these four plants in this room upstairs last night, right? And I own two plant waves at home. And I had plant wave hooked up to my Monstera plant. And this monstera plant was just like kicking. It was just spitting out all of the stuff. And that's how I prepared the music. And I came into the room and the room was so chill. The plants were just like, bing. Just like notes here and there. And I'm like, what am I going to do with this? I wanted all this stuff. They're like antennas. It's real stuff. I could go on about this forever. I could probably just take 15 minutes talking about this. 

05:26
Bryan Noll
So that's a little bit of what I do. I'll talk more about it. I'll pass it on down the line. 

05:32
Andre Cortez
So my name is Andrea, and I've experienced the same thing as Brian's talking about. It's like you have other band members. The plants are live interaction in how you play with them, and so I play harp with the plants. I'm a music therapist, and I am focused on creating restorative listening spaces with ambient soundscapes, with the harp and with the plants. And so I find this also this kind of surprise. The plants do their own thing, and even if I want to control them. So sometimes there have been surprises when I go and play live with them, like, they're not as active for different reasons because they're responding to their environment. They're responding to being taken. 

06:19
Andre Cortez
I work with house plants, so I'll take them out of my house and take them somewhere, and then they're kind of like they have stage fright or something. They're not playing as much because they're in a different environment and they're responding in a different way. So being aware of that kind of difference, you have to kind of just flow with it when you're working with a live being. 

06:45
Ghalani
Yeah. My name is Galani, and I think, Andrea, you just said it beautifully. Well, that feels like the primary reason I'm here and I'm doing this, and it's probably similar for you. I feel like what you said about stage fright and the fact that there's such an intimacy and you notice the life force and the humanness in the plant and the plantness in you. And I think it feels intuitively like the right direction that we need to be going on as people. Right. 

07:20
Ghalani
And for me personally, the way that I connect with these plants some of the time, because I play bass and I'm from a jazz background some of the time, it's like you playing duets with the plant, and you feel like you have this exchange of energy and exchange of whatever happens in that moment, because just, like, improvisation, just like us as humans, we don't know what's going to happen. And I love that. And that's what brought me to jazz, and that's also what I love about the duets, is, yeah, you can expect things, but people might not give it to you. And the same is there with plants, because they are living. And the second way that I interact with it is it's a way that I'm trying to capture now. 

08:06
Ghalani
And when you go out into native environments, the plants, because it is a different environment and a different set of stimulus, they're going to react, feel, and interact with you so differently. And I think one thing that is really beautiful is that when you go out into nature, we all have this sense of the autonomy that nature has and that we play a role in it. So for me personally, that's what I want to do right now. Go out to native environments, have the plants speak on their own terms and have their own empowerment, be on their own terms. And I can help with that, and others will help as well. 

08:46
Joe Patitucci
I love that. Thank you. I want touch on something that I heard us all mention, which is plants are beings. A lot of people think of plants as things, which is kind of interesting because they're very active. I mean, if you look at a time lapse of a flower through a day, it's clearly responding to its environment. And honestly, the more we get to know what physical reality is, the less things kind of exist, too. We start to see things as processes, right? Everything is happening in a way, and I can get deeper into more philosophy tHere. But I think that one thing that's really powerful about plant music is that it brings this heightened awareness of the fact that we are living beings in a world of living beings. We are Earth beings, and we share elements. 

09:53
Joe Patitucci
We share a lot of characteristics with these other beings. And when you start to see these other beings as collaborators, things can start to shift. And I know that, for me, shifted my life spiritually. And I'm sure that, and I hear that a lot from our plant wave customers, that people use plantwave for the first time, and all of a sudden they're meditating. They're like, why am I meditating? I've never done this before. But there's something about plant music and this exchange and sitting with plants that brings that out in us. And so I thought, anyone have anything to share on that? 

10:35
Bryan Noll
I got a tote bag last night up in eleven B that says, plants teach us how to listen. 

10:41
Joe Patitucci
Plants are here to teach us to listen. 

10:43
Bryan Noll
Plants are here to teach us to listen. It's a plant wave tote bag that you can get. You nailed it. That's it. Listening. How do we listen? Do we listen with our ears? Do we listen with our eyes? Do we listen with something that we can't quite put a finger on? What is listening? What is attention? What is paying attention? Plants surely help that. Even just these surprises that I was talking about earlier, that surprise happens. And it reminds me that I'm now, I'm in the moment. I'm happening right now. I'm happening. And so Galani said something earlier. What was this? The humanness of plants and the plantness of humans. I like that one. I don't know if I want to riff on that right now, but I'll give the floor to anyone else that wants to take that one. 

11:47
Andre Cortez
So, just as Joe was saying that we think of plants as things, I mean, there's this kind of a common way to see plants. And when you use the plant wave and start working with plant music, I see the reactions and the responses of people when I'm bringing it into groups, and they're like, wow, it's alive. And, of course it's alive. BUt that's the first response is like, wow, this plant is reacting to me. And so you can reach out to the leaves, you can even put your hands around the plant, and you'll hear some of the fluctuations and the sounds changing. So you can get an immediate response and feel that interaction with the plant. And like Joe was saying about it raises this awareness of that, yes, they're living beings, but it helps us to make that connection with plants more deeply. 

12:45
Joe Patitucci
Anything to add, Galani? 

12:49
Ghalani
Yeah, I think as far as the connection that we have with the plants, I think it feels like a very positive direction that we're going in. And I think the core thing is, when we have a relationship with these plants, there's a natural tendency to have a relationship of extraction, because we have so much extraction everywhere in our society right now. And I think what's really important, not only as I don't know how many of us are artists or environmentalists or both or a billion things, but I think that one, the intimacy that we gain from these interactions with plants will manifest in different interactions we have with other parts of the natural world that we are a part of. 

13:42
Ghalani
And also, too, I think that the way we treat other humans, if we can embody this intimacy and embody this movement away from an extractive model, it'll be deeply healing. 

14:02
Joe Patitucci
Few things touch on there that resonate is, yeah, the extractive nature of a lot of our society at this time. And, in fact, my feelings on that actually kept me from making plant wave for years. I've known Brian for, what, ten years? Eleven years? And I started making plant music in 2012. And I remember everyone was like, you got to make a product. You got to make a product. You got to make a product. I was like, hell no. I am not making another thing that doesn't need to be made. Right. But over time, it became clear that people actually, there's a portion of humans that felt like they really needed this to demonstrate this connection. And I feel like at Datagarden, we're working to bridge people from where they are. Like, right now, that's where people are. People are in technology. 

15:06
Joe Patitucci
They're in their phones. They're stuck there. And we hope for plant wave to be this bridge, to bridge them out of that world, back into this connection with plants, back into the connection with the physical world and the metaphysical world. And something else that you said there about this healing exchange and tuning, it's a good direction for us to be going, right? And I believe that this is innate to us. It's not even necessarily somewhere we're going. It's somewhere we're reentering. Right. It's a place within ourselves that we're re accessing. And I would love to hear. I'm sure we all have stories. I'll tell a quick little story, like the first time I ever made plant music, in 2011 or 2012. The Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

16:10
Joe Patitucci
There were thousands of people that were coming through this space to check out this installation that's very much like what's going on upstairs. And I would notice, like, school children would come through, and the kids, they would come through, and I don't know if you've ever seen this, but once they understood what's going on, they would hold their hands up and feel the energy exchange between their hands and the plants. Nobody directed them to do that. They would just start going like this. And this one girl, she turns to her mom, and she says, hey, mom, all you have to do is think light coming through your hands, and the plants will sing for you. And I was just like, whoa. It was the first time I had hooked this whole system up. And the mom's, like, crying. 

17:04
Joe Patitucci
Like, I've never heard my daughter, like, oh, my God, this is so incredible. And that kind of situation happened quite a few times. And then certain people would walk into the room, and the music would shift, and I'd be like, what the hell's going on? Nobody's touching the plants. Why is this plant completely changing the patterns it's making? I'd walk up to a person and say, hey, I might sound like crazy, but that plant seemed to completely change when you walked in the room. And each time I would bring this up, person would just say, like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. What do you mean, that makes sense? They say, oh, yeah, I'm an energy healer. Yeah, I'm a Reiki master, or I'm a botanist, or I'm a florist. People with really deep connections to subtle forms of energy and also. And plants. 

17:54
Joe Patitucci
So plants are eating light, or they're processing light for food. And the visible light spectrum is this, and the available light that other beings can process is much larger. So if you start to think of it in that way, it's actually not that, woo. It's just like, oh, we're partnering with plants to monitor these shifts in energy in a space that are outside of that which we can perceive. I thought I'd bring that up and I don't know if any of you have any stories come up from that. Of course, anybody that has a plant wave has had this experience, so I'll open it up. 

18:39
Andre Cortez
Same thing. It's interesting because once people get into the space with plant music, then it's open for them to come up with ideas of how to interact with plants in ways that you wouldn't have thought of. But I've had, one time I had someone rubbing her hands together, increasing the energy. Also bioenergy, which is you find that in Qigong and in Tai chi practices for increasing bioenergy. She did this and then she put her hands over the plant and it definitely worked. The plant was responding to her even though she wasn't touching the leaves. So that was a really interesting response. I've also noticed when I play the harp with the plants, I've noticed, as I phrase, I run through a phrase and then I come to an ending because the music ends and it pauses. The plants pause with me. I've noticed that. 

19:36
Andre Cortez
And it's really interesting and it makes it musical as well. Right? It's like ending and pausing with me. As I increase volume with my harp, I feel like the plant is moving in that direction with more sound, so you can hear that difference also with the harp. And plants respond to sound vibrations. There's been a lot of studies that have shown that frequencies applied to plants can help them on a cellular level, even on the DNA level, to help them, for genes to express, to help them to protect themselves, to grow quicker. So sound also is a treatment for therapy for plants itself. So I find that kind of like we're talking about extractive behaviors, but this is, I feel like that give and take, that reciprocity when I'm playing, right? 

20:35
Andre Cortez
Because I'm playing the harp for the plant also, and then it's playing with me. 

20:40
Bryan Noll
So I love that interaction, this conversational cadence idea of plants pausing. I had an experience where we had a plant hooked up. We had a plant with plant wave. I guess it was Midi sprout at that time, the precursor to plant wave. And it was a ceremonial context and it was a group of people, a lot of family, and we had a moment of silence for those who had passed, and some who had very recently passed, and the plant had been just singing along throughout the ceremony. And we had this moment, and everybody got silent, and the plant stopped for the first time for the whole thing, and got silent. And then we resumed, and the plant started back. And it's like coincidence. I mean, come on, the plant's another being just right with us. 

21:33
Bryan Noll
We all chilled out, and the plants like, yeah, I'm there with you. So it's pretty amazing. 

21:38
Joe Patitucci
Yeah, it's important to note, too. It's like, these are anecdotes, right? So it's hard to say exactly what's happening, however it happened. And that happening created space for a meaningful moment, right? And so part of engaging with plantwave is this, setting aside space to listen more deeply, to tune into the synchronicities that are already happening around us. And, yeah, it's a way of kind of like practicing moving through life, seeing everything around you as a messenger, and holding space for your experience. And that's a thing that to me. So I didn't meditate or anything before I started making plant music. What happened was that the plants, through Those times where the plants changed their patterns, they were creating the plants basically introduced me to the healers, that introduced me to the practices that allowed me to tune more deeply into myself. 

23:13
Joe Patitucci
So I feel like the practice of listening to plants, the practice of listening in general, can have a lot of benefits. Not only just listening to plants, but listening to improves communication and things. Have you experienced any of you guys? 

23:32
Andre Cortez
I definitely think it is so much about listening. And in my work with sound meditation, I talk about how we don't just listen with our ears, but we listen with our whole body. Because vibration, whether it's heard vibration or unheard vibration, our body listens. We can detect vibration through our skin, through the bones, in addition to our ears. So it's a new way of listening. And like Galani was saying, that it can transform how we interact then with our environment. And listening outside of just working with the plants, you go into nature, you are more awake to that interaction and listening on a different level. 

24:26
Bryan Noll
This idea of amplifiers, Joe, you said something about plants being amplifiers and amplifiers of meaning. Sometimes we need an amplifier to hear the subtle sound. And it's like a prosthetic for deeper meaning. The experience that I shared. Yeah, like you said, that's the point. The meaning was so much more poignant when were made aware of it as it was happening. Made more aware of it as it was happening. Because of that amplification and then Joe said something last night, right after my performance. 

25:13
Joe Patitucci
What? You. Yeah. So this is actually like, kind of a guiding principle for me. Over the last ten years, as I was making plant music, I watched this, like, Terrence McKenna talk late at night. You know how it goes. We've all been there. And I just love this quote. It's that biological systems are amplifiers of quantum mechanical indeterminacy. They are a way of taking the smidgen of indeterminacy that exists at the microphysical level and coaxing it into a kind of macrophysical cascade, which is life, consciousness, and self reflection. So in that way, you can think of this quantum realm of possibility. Right? And that is on this microphysical level. And it's almost like when a wave becomes a particle or something, or when an idea becomes a thing, there's this magical moment when anything is possible, right? 

26:24
Joe Patitucci
But then something happens, and there's something that happens there with plant music that I think we've all felt in different ways, where it's like, yeah, it can really highlight moments, and whether that's the plant responding to us and our thoughts, or the plant responding to shifts in light or something else totally out there, all that matters is how we're bringing ourselves into that experience. And I think that. Yeah, I just really love. But there is this possibility. Yeah, maybe this is holographic theory. Everything is an expression of the implicate order of waveforms that consciousness is bouncing off of and creating form. So maybe that's what's happening, too. 

27:12
Bryan Noll
Everything. I kind of want to get into the nerd zone now that you're talking about waveforms, but I don't want to. Does anybody got anything yet? I mean, if not, I'm going to hit the nerd zone. 

27:22
Joe Patitucci
Okay, before you jump into that, I just want to define. There are different ways of creating the plant music, right. So we all have a little bit different practices. So I would love to ask you, or just first describe what I've experienced of you all in terms of your performances. Brian. Brian does live synthesis using the plant inputs. And so you're kind of like mixing the data real time and routing it places. And then, Andrea, I witnessed you were playing harp with the plants in our installation, and then you were also doing some touching of plants, and that was bringing some things up. So that's a little bit of. A little bit of a different practice. And, Galani, from my understanding, you go kind of like out into nature and record things and play bass along with your plants. 

28:24
Joe Patitucci
So these are just kinds of different ways you can do this. And then if you want to check out, just like, a way to make an installation or like a monitoring system for plants, that you can check out our lounge upstairs. But, yeah, with that, Brian, I'd just love to hear a little more about your system. What are you using with your plant wave? What's your philosophy around design? Yeah, take it away. 

28:52
Bryan Noll
Are you ready? Okay, so, modular synthesizers. Who does not know what a modular synthesizer is? So you remember the old telephone patchboards when you call the operator and you want to talk to someone down the street, and they had to patch a cable and patch a cable. So modular synthesizers basically take voltage and allow you to do anything with that voltage. That voltage is something you can hear if it's fast enough or it's something that can change something for you if it's slow enough. A wave that says, I want more of this, I want less of this. Now, there's this idea of random. Random being literal random numbers, random data. When random is fast enough, it is something we call white noise. It's just all the frequencies, even amount, everything. 

29:45
Bryan Noll
And so this idea of random is the center, I think, of the way that I've put processes together. And I can take that random and take a sample of it at a moment, and that will be a certain value. And I can take a sample of it at another moment, and that will be a certain value. Those values I can assign to notes. I could make a melody by sampling random and repeating it, or I could make a melody that is repetitive, but changes a little bit over time and slightly changes by having it repeat. But let's insert in one of these slots that I've sampled a new random value and have it develop over time. Right? So I use random a lot with the modular synthesizer. And so working with plant wave, it felt like the same thing to me. 

30:47
Bryan Noll
So I saw plant wave through the lens of sampling random so I can take the data from the plants. That feels like what we kind of. Someone came to the performance last night, was asking a lot of questions, and we sort of came upon this idea that plants are kind of like multidimensional random. Because this random that I'm sampling is, say, coming from white noise, and I'm sampling just one moment, it feels like that's just a singular dimension of data. But the fact that the plants I'm sampling from that, but they're going to be changing in a different way and not giving me as much new information as random is always new and always not as organized organized on some level. That's not able to be understood. 

31:44
Bryan Noll
So I can sample this data and I can change anything in the timbre, the brightness, the darkness of the sound. I can change the melody. I could change the rhythm. If we want to get really nerdy about this, there's a process that I use that I got from talking with new. In my new setup. I call it Nature of Arps. Because from nature of now, which is Joe's handle on a lot of Instagram and stuff like that. And it's this idea of using an arpeggiator. Who are the music nerds here that know what an arpeggiator is? Yeah. So, like an arpeggiator on, like, a synthesizer, you can hold down a few notes, and you say, I want this arpeggiator to happen at a certain rate, and it's going to go quick. 

32:39
Joe Patitucci
An arpeggiator is a way of deciding the timing that notes are expressed. So you can say that the plant is allowed to spit out 16 notes per allotted amount of time. Or, like, one note per allotted amount of time. So what Brian's talking about is setting up systems where you can select how many notes that a plan is allowed to spit out at a time. Keep going. 

33:10
Bryan Noll
This is good. It's time quantization. So if you think of pitch just being a big thing that does that, and you sample it at certain places, you can quantize that pitch into a scale. So it actually sounds like the kind of music we're used to listening to. And so this time quantization is an important concept in the way that I'll sample these. So you sample something so that it falls at a certain division of time and a certain pitch scale. And then you can work with that. And you can start to make it feel really good. Like, one of my tricks is to sample in the duple in twos, in numbers of two, along with numbers of three. Because the music of Ghana was really important to my musical development. And I don't have two hands for it. 

34:08
Bryan Noll
But that was three stumps for every four hits on my knee. And that feeling is like, in all the music that we know, we owe groove and feel. My philosophy, we owe groove and feel to that music, to West African music, but to African music. And so I'll combine the threes and twos on all divisions of time. Like really fast and really slow. And you put those together and you just let it go. And maybe if it's too busy, you carve it down with literal probability. Just chance, Ab coin toss chance. Whether it's going to be an event that happens or going to be an event that is silent and somehow music just happens out of it just starts sounding like music. 

35:05
Joe Patitucci
Beautiful. So that's a really cool approach. I never thought about that three and four kind of pairing. That's, like, super powerful. We'll get into making. We'll build that into the. Huh, Carl? We'll work on that. So, Andrea, how about you tell us a little bit about your practice of designing instruments for plants to play with. 

35:34
Bryan Noll
Yeah. 

35:34
Andre Cortez
So I'm designing the sounds to create therapeutic spaces, restorative spaces. Coming from a music therapist perspective, I think of things like harmony. I think of things like tempo. I think of things that can. Our body responds to sounds in certain ways, so I want to create and design the sounds so our nervous systems can reset, so our nervous systems can regulate and get out of, like, fight or flight and get into deep relaxation. And so I'm thinking of these things as I design the sound. And so I'm using, with the plants, I use Ableton software, and I use some plugins. There's free plugins you can get that you can download, and you can have instruments like a piano, cello, that have samples of real acoustic instruments. That sounds really nice. 

36:34
Andre Cortez
I like using the synth sounds as well, but I really like bringing in the instrument sound that's like acoustic sound. So I have that working through Ableton, and then I have the scales. I make sure to just drop scales into the MIDI tracks so that the parameters are within certain scales, and then I can play in tune with the harp, with the plants. So that's important because in therapeutic spaces, you want to have this kind of harmony and the timing. To be in a therapeutic experience, I'm using the software to design it a little bit different than how, if you got the plant wave just as it is out of the box, it comes with different sounds. You don't have to use a software like Ableton or something like that, but you can design it and take it a step further. 

37:44
Andre Cortez
So that's what I'm doing. 

37:46
Joe Patitucci
Awesome. And I noticed that when you were playing, there was one plant that you were touching to get it to respond, and it wasn't really playing beyond that. Was that because the plant wasn't very active, or is that because you had it set? Did you have maybe a threshold set so that it wouldn't pick up a signal unless you touched it? 

38:13
Andre Cortez
Yeah, I didn't set the threshold. I think that plant was just, like, really quiet. But when I barely reached touch it, and it would just light up extremely. I had the cello on that and another sound coming out of that. But then it's kind of cool, because then it's obvious I can work with the timing, too. Like, I'm playing a phrase, and then I want to hear the cello sound. So let me play with my left hand on the strings, and let me reach for the plant with my right hand and kind of coordinate and then bring the timing in of the cello to come in right when it feels right. 

38:51
Joe Patitucci
Cool. So if it was a more active plant, you definitely would have played differently, because there wouldn't have been. It sounds like you were able to kind of coax the plant into, like, oh, it's your turn now. But other times, we're just like, okay, it's doing its thing. All right, where do I have space to contribute to this music? 

39:11
Andre Cortez
Yeah, definitely. Then that's where the listening comes in. I'm listening to just like you would with a bandmate or another person that you're playing with. How do we fit together, and how do I build this phrasing with what the plant is? Yeah. 

39:29
Joe Patitucci
Beautiful. Awesome. Galani, tell us a little bit about your process, what you're using, and how you're building. 

39:37
Ghalani
Yes. So, as far as what I'm using is the plant wave, my laptop, sometimes bass, and I'm going through logic, the DAw to record. And I think that a key point to make is that this is a medium. It's not just something that you can do exclusively in a certain way or just exclusively, even with plants, even though this is the way we're presenting it here, because I put the soft pads on my dog's paws, and you hear how a dog sounds, you can put it on your own body. So it's not just exclusive to any sort of living thing. Right. Yeah. 

40:24
Ghalani
And I think another key point is that since this is a medium, like, when we talk about the indeterminacy and how there's this type A meets type B, like left brain, right brain dance that we can do with it, or, like, you're talking about curation, like, how we can curate it, is essentially a medium because there's so much you can do in so many different ways. And for me, personally, to get to how I use it, one of the favorite things that's actually, this is one performance I have on YouTube, but I was trying to just experiment things for a duet I was doing. It was out in Los Angeles, and I was looking up a whole bunch of samples, and I do a whole bunch of TikTok samples. 

41:13
Ghalani
And I got this really corny British type of, like, it's a thousand most common know, like, aw, potato. And I was putting all those into the thing. But then if you hook that up to the MIDI, you start to get a generative language, right? And a lot of times we talk about, like, my best friend Caleb. Shout to Caleb, hey, Caleb. We grew up together and basically he's a teacher now. And he was talking about the story of one of his students was using an AI generation for a paper to cheat on the paper. And that's really clever, something I've probably done. We have to tell them not to do it. 

41:51
Ghalani
But I think the key thing is, in the same way that we use AI to manifest new realities and use AI to generate new artistic synergies between technology and art, which is why we're all here, right? The same thing can be used for other living things that we can use plants to manifest new art, right. We can make language from it. The possibilities are endless. 

42:18
Joe Patitucci
Go ahead. 

42:19
Bryan Noll
I'm so curious. What kind of things did the plants say when all those words were, did you hook up the plant so that it would trigger different words? 

42:30
Ghalani
Yes. One was just TikToks. It was just a whole bunch of TikTok memes. That was part of it because it was about a 30 minutes performance. So it was like five minutes were a whole bunch of TikTok samples just interlocked. And then probably another five to eight minutes was the actual audio. There was two performances. One I did exclusively in English and one was English and Japanese as well. But for the English one, it would say a lot of things like, since it's the common. Like, most 1000 words is what I based it on, it would be a whole lot of like, I-B-I am. I ai like mad. I. 

43:10
Ghalani
It got kind of creepy at a certain point because you hear the most common words and a lot of them, it's so human because they're the most common, that it gives us this really humanistic way of expressing itself. Yeah, it feels kind of like. Because it's very limited, it feels how you might talk to how four year olds express themselves where it's very raw. It's not a big vocabulary, but it's very raw in its conciseness. Yeah. 

43:39
Joe Patitucci
I've had a similar experience. I cut up English phonemes and gave it to a plant. There's actually a TikTok video out there of me with Duncan Trussell. And he had it hooked up to his synths and stuff, and I brought this patch out that was just English phoneme. So just like the 46 or 48 elements of the sounds that we creating in English. So we hooked it up and it was like. But then when Duncan touched the plant, it was liKe, so, yeah, so if you check, you can find that on TikTok. Yeah. So everybody, obviously in the comments is like, oh, My God. It said, I love you because we stare at clouds and see elephants and tigers, and we stare at stars and see battles and all these things. But hey, who knows, right? 

44:43
Joe Patitucci
Something else that I feel like we probably all have a similar approach in terms of, we all value harmony in our music. We're all kind of holding space. When I first started making this kind of music, I guess I kind of developed a design language, and part of that was like, I mostly use pentatonic scales. And the reason behind that is because it doesn't matter what sequence or what order the notes are played in, it's always going to sound harmonious. And some People ask, like, well, why Would you Do that? I want to just hear the raw signal. Do you really want to hear the raw sIgnal? You can. It's intense. And also, this is about creating an experience for humans to listen for a longer period of time so that you can experience the subtle changes that happen. 

45:43
Joe Patitucci
And so what we're working to do is we're working to hold space for a person to have that experience. And so that's why we're choosing pentatonic scales, because we want to create this space. And then over time, you'll start to notice, like, shifts in patterns or maybe the shifts in speed and other things. So one thing that I do is the value of harmony. The second thing that's really important for, and this stuff's all built into the plant wave app. So another thing is that it's not just about the notes. The notes are an expression of the wave from the plant. But then there are control messages, which you can think of as, like, knob turns, and those are an expression of, basically how quickly the data changes. So You CaN ThInk Of THIs as, like, In YOur OwN body. 

46:34
Joe Patitucci
If you're resting and you have a slow heart rate, and then 4 hours later, you're dancing. The change in your heart rate between now and when you're dancing is slow, but if somebody lights a firecracker behind you, all of a sudden your heart rate changes fast. So with the plants, yeah, basically, if there's a quick change in the data from the plant, it can kind of turn this knob. And so we have that mapped in the plant wave app to change arpeggiation rates so it can increase the speed at which a note is playing. It can activate some instruments and not activate others. So, beyond the notes, a big thing is monitoring the big shifts in activity as control changes or through effects or through activating or deactivating instruments. And I'm wondering if any of you have any other little tricks up your sleeve. 

47:42
Joe Patitucci
I would love to hear any other Little things. Yeah. 

47:45
Bryan Noll
The control change is sort of the most important part, really. It is what takes what could just be a big mess of notes and allows you to kind of carve different zones of meaning in that. And when I watch the wave that comes from it, I use the software bitwig. And in Bitwig, there are these really easy modulators. You just bring in this CC control change, as it's called, and you can see the wave graft. And so I can just kind of stop and listen with my eyes and see, okay, so the plant's here, and it's kind of moving here now, and it's kind of moving here. And you can say, well, if my values are between zero and 127, you can carve that into a few different zones. 

48:39
Bryan Noll
And those zones can be like, all right, at the bottom, at the least, activity, let's make it slow. Let's make it silent. Let's turn off everything. And at the very high end, let's make it super reverbed, like the echo in this room or something. Let's do something really big and drastic, and you can take other little zones in between. And, you know, I want these instruments to happen here and these instruments to happen here. Andrea was saying earlier, you were talking about the cello being, like, on a plant, as if you have one plant doing one instrument, which is really cool. And I want to start to try that now. Somebody said that last night to me. I made an ensemble of cello and upright bass and piano and harp and voice saying oohs and Oz like vowels. And another instrument that I'm forgetting. 

49:40
Bryan Noll
Oh, and marimba, because I just wanted some acoustic instruments to go along with the synthesized sounds. And they were all, though, working on the same note set from one single plant. So what's helpful is to use that slower rate of change that is coming from. This is a good reminder. I'm glad you said this, Joe, that it's coming from the rate of change. So the fact that it's not about the notes, it's about the change. So you map that change to, well, maybe when it changes fast, we do the instruments that have a fast attack, like, know and the piano. And maybe when it's a little bit lower, I map it to the bode instruments or something. And these are all ways of revealing this change to reveal this thing we're talking about, that we might not be able to see this thing. 

50:37
Bryan Noll
We can't sense these plants being antennas. So mapping the CC, if you want to get into it, I mean, obviously, the plant wave app works just as it is. You don't need to do that. You don't need to get into this level. But if you want to get into that level, the CCs are where it's at. 

50:54
Joe Patitucci
Just to clarify, too, the plant wave app has all of this design philosophy built into it. So, in fact, if you go over to our expo booth over there, 1545, you'll notice there's a plant that's playing this one soundset, which is called celestial being, and there are these chimes that can come in. The chimes only happen when there's a huge shift in the plant. So I just went over there, and on my way here, and I was like, okay, cool. What sound set are you guys using? Oh, here, let's put this one on. Okay, cool. And it was just droning. I was like, okay, cool. It's just droning. What happens if you touch it made this cascade of bliss, and they're like, whoa, what was that? And I was like, oh, okay, it's set up now. 

51:45
Joe Patitucci
I'm going to go to the stage, but it's really simple. All this stuff is built into plant wave, so it's really plug and play. And we're adding new sound sets all the time with even More expression, so that every day when you tune into your plants, you can have a different experience, not only in terms of the melodic content, but what instruments are active today. Like, what's going on over here? Yeah, I would love to hear a little bit more about design. 

52:16
Andre Cortez
Yeah. The pentatonic scales are key for me because I'm playing an instrument live with the plants. So I'm finding that actually, if I set it to a minor pentatonic, and I can actually introduce different scales related to the pentatonic scale. And so I was trying to do that when were in the plant lounge. And so I could start on an F minor pentatonic, but then I could find a related key, and then it gives it a different feeling, because when we move into a different scale, we create a different feeling and creates a different response for people. So it could actually kind of move into different moods with related scales. But the pentatonic scale is key for being able to do that. 

52:59
Bryan Noll
The power of the perfect fifth. For the musicians here, everything builds off of the fifth. It's like the Harmonic series. You've got your root, your fifth, and if you stack fifths above that root five times, you get a pentatonic scale. It's like mind blowing. 

53:15
Andre Cortez
It's all math. 

53:20
Joe Patitucci
This is anecdotal, but I've heard from users, some users are just purists and they're just like, they set it. They just go and they set it chromatic. They're like, I'm just going to let it do whatever I want. And I've heard from some people have claimed they've had parties where they all sang together and the plant kind of came into key. I haven't had that experience. I haven't tried. I don't have enough patience for that. In a way, I just want to listen to it being chill. But Kalani, I've heard some of your stuff. Sometimes you have it scaled. I think you use maybe a major scale or maybe it's chromatic. I would love to hear about some of what you've experienced in that. 

54:05
Ghalani
Yeah, I think especially if you are going about this in terms of an audience watching it, I think it's really nice to play with the fact that all these scales have different moods, cultural contexts, and also a lot of the times levels of intensity to where it's like when we talk about the pentatonic scale, especially because it is based off of the natures of physics, of sound. That's why it's the most cross cultural scale. Right. Every culture has this scale. So if you think of it and you want to convey that you can through the music with the chromatic scale, there's a lot of times chaos and dissonant intervals. It could sometimes sounds atonal or serial, like that music. So you can use that as an artist speaking to the artist in the room. 

54:55
Ghalani
You can use this as a mode of artistic expression to not only have calmness, but evoke any emotion that you want to. 

55:13
Joe Patitucci
Awesome. Is there anything else you'd like to share? I know that we talked a little bit about how we use it or how we design for it. I'd love to learn a little bit. I know that you use different tools, I think, than we do. You use logic. 

55:28
Ghalani
Yeah. 

55:29
Joe Patitucci
Great. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

55:31
Ghalani
Yeah. So I'll talk about the most complicated example I have of it, because a lot of times it is really simple, like you're saying the plug and go. Especially out in nature where there's like flies that I don't want to mess with. But for those performances, my actual chain is from the plants and to the plant wave. And then I use logic as a daw. And a lot of times I'll have automations for different scenes that I'm doing live, especially when I'm doing duets with the plant. So I'll have a certain voice for a scene. I use Arturia. It's a synthesizer is in the computer, but you can play synthesizer sounds with your computer alone. It's not like a physical hardware thing. So I use Arturia for the voices of the plant and I map these. I say, okay, really airy voice. 

56:24
Ghalani
Let's say to start out lots of wind sounds or textures. Then you can have scene change and you can automate that through logic. I'm honestly envious of Ableton because there's a lot of creative things you can do on it that you can't with logic. But I love logic for it's very intuitive and you can automate it that way. So that's why I do it. And. Yeah, so I think also in terms of when we talk about the expression, you can also change the expression mid performance if you want. So that's another way of playing with the tones and the evocativeness of the plant and you together. 

56:58
Joe Patitucci
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, so there's so many different ways to play and create with plant wave and just to even just experience plant wave as a part of your life, just having it. I just have it hooked up at home. Basically, if you go up to the plant music lounge upstairs, it's like a four X replica of my apartment in LA back in the day. If you ever checked out Plants FM, where I was broadcasting plants 24/7 from my apartment, it's basically the same thing, but just like four times bigger. And you just go and chill out up there. 

57:32
Bryan Noll
And if you want to see what that looks like, I have a video called Garment of Destiny on YouTube that I shot when I was house sitting at his place a few years ago, his old place. So you'll see one of those corners of that place. 

57:46
Joe Patitucci
It looks almost exactly the same. Yeah. Thanks all for being here and thank you, everyone, for coming out. I know we just have a few more minutes left, so thought we could go down the line for some final thoughts. Anything anyone would like to share? Make sure that we maybe haven't communicated to the audience yet? 

58:09
Andre Cortez
What about questions? 

58:11
Joe Patitucci
Yeah, we want to do some questions. Yeah, let's do some questions. We have like two minutes or 1 minute, but yeah. Any questions in the house? Oh, yeah, go ahead. Sure. So the question was, have I ever hooked it up to old trees? And does it resonate in a different way than a house plant? Yes, I have. What I've experienced is with woodier plants, there's less water in there that would allow for us to measure the movement in these changes. So I tend to work more with hardy tropical plants because they're a lot more expressive. So, for instance, like a larger tree, a lot of times it'll just be putting out like one or two notes. It'll be more of a drone. It'll sound more like a tropical plant if you don't water it enough. 

59:21
Joe Patitucci
Similarly, like a mushroom will often kind of be more constant too, which they're fungi. I'm not exactly sure how they're working. 

59:30
Bryan Noll
In the mycelium, the network under is where it's all going down. And so the fruiting body above has less going on is what I would assume. 

59:40
Joe Patitucci
Yeah. And it's like, try making a sensor for mycelium networks that are impossible to even see. Great question. Any others? 

59:54
Andre Cortez
Thank you so much. 

59:55
Joe Patitucci
Oh, we got one back here. 

01:00:00
Andre Cortez
Thanks. 

01:00:01
Speaker 6
I'm curious how you strike the balance between kind of staying true to the data and then how much sound design you incorporate. Because I totally understand making it kind of palatable for the ear. I don't know how to express that exactly, but how do you kind of convey that to the listener too, to say there's sound design involved, because I feel like educating the listener in a way is important because otherwise lack of understanding could be like, oh, plant music is beautiful naturally. So I'm just curious about that. 

01:00:42
Joe Patitucci
Yeah. Like, oh, I didn't know plants sound like flutes and angels and piano. I didn't know plants. Plants sound like pianos. Maybe that's why they came up with the piano sound, because the plants told them that they should make sounds like this and they figured it out. Yeah. So we try to be as clear as we can with do our best to communicate that. It's really challenging on the Internet when something goes viral, but we do that through our website and through the app with just like, okay, you connect your plant, and then the plant sends this data and it plays notes on these instruments and we give you control, I think a lot of people, because we're giving you control of what instrument you are listening to. It's obvious, right? 

01:01:33
Joe Patitucci
But on that question related to that balance between design and representing it as purely as possible. It really depends. There are a lot of different sound sets in the plant wave app, and they all have different use cases, some of them are there to represent the data as directly as possible. We have a new one that just came out, I think, yesterday. That's basically a sine wave that just follows the data and it's scaled to a pentatonic scale, but you definitely hear the wave. There's one called points on waves. It's also, like a lot more of a direct translation. And then there are others that are more like, hey, you can just leave this on all day and it'll sound kind of the same. And it's like a little bit less of a direct expression of it, but it serves a purpose for humans. 

01:02:37
Joe Patitucci
So we include all that info in the app, just of the different use cases or what to listen for as well. There's a little what to listen for section. So you'll know, like, oh, wow, it's playing these chimes. It only does that when it's at this level of activity. But yeah, it's really like design thinking and thinking about what the goal is the goal to monitor the plant's activity. And so we have some that are designed specifically for that and some that are designed more for other aspects. Anyone else? It sounds like we all kind of have this built into. 

01:03:18
Andre Cortez
It's easier when you're working with people in person because there's a level that you can show them and they can experience that the plant really is responding to them. And I also mentioned plant responds to the wind, to the lighting in the room. So you do hear these changes. That's not in my design. It's the plant that's responding. And so when they can get that real interaction, then there's that balance you're talking about of that response. 

01:03:49
Bryan Noll
You develop an ear for the change. It's not making the music, it's making the change. We designed the music for it to make, and we hopefully design, or we may design it in a way so as to reveal the change. And the more you experience it and get used to it, the more you. 

01:04:08
Andre Cortez
Learn to recognize and you're listening, and you're working on listening because that helps also people to listen deeply, because as musicians, you hear it, you hear all those changes. But it's kind of like another level for everyone to listen on a deeper level. 

01:04:24
Bryan Noll
What a great question. Thank you. 

01:04:26
Joe Patitucci
Awesome. Well, we're a little overtime, so if there are any parting comments. Well, I'll start I'll just say, check out the plant wave lounge upstairs. It's like the highest expression of what this experience is, in my humble opinion. It's upstairs. Eleven B. Also, we have plant waves for sale here. So come check that out if you'd like to bring this experience home. And, yeah, any other parting thoughts here? 

01:04:55
Bryan Noll
I mean, I'll just talk about myself, I'd say, yeah, I have some plant wave videos on YouTube. Check out Lightbath. Just search light bath ligtbath and plant wave. Or maybe some of them may say Midi sprout. I don't remember. But plant music and that. Yeah, and you can see some of it in performance. 

01:05:11
Andre Cortez
Well, you can find me at Mindbody Music Center. I'm based in Austin. 

01:05:17
Ghalani
My name is Galani. My artist's name is the growth eternal. And you can find me on YouTube at the growth eternal. Thank you. 

01:05:26
Joe Patitucci
Awesome, everyone. We're going to be here all day. Thank you. Yeah, we'll be here. Feel free to stop by if you have any questions. Lots of love. 

01:05:38
Joe Patitucci
This episode is brought to you by Plantwave. What would plants sound like if they could sing? Well, thanks to plantwave, we now know they would sound like whatever you want them to sound like, because you can select instruments for your plants to play. These instruments are collections of instruments that I designed that are designed to help you hear the data from plants as music. And they're also designed to hold space for really cool experiences, like meditation or relaxing or reading or whatever you want to do. Staring at clouds? 

01:06:14
Joe Patitucci
I don't know. 

01:06:15
Joe Patitucci
What do you like doing? I like staring at clouds. Clouds are cool. Plant waves kind of like staring at clouds, but listening to plants, it's kind of a similar vibe. So if you're into staring at clouds and seeing cool patterns in clouds, then you're probably into listening to plants. And if that's you, then we vibe. So check out plantwave. Just go to plantwave.com and yeah, get yourself a plant wave. Listen your plants and share it with your friends.