Bio-Sonified

Nature has shown human impacts on the environment, yet we often neglect them. Many organisms have adapted to our civilization and compromised with the damages caused.

How can we then bridge the gap between humans and nature by learning from the way nature communicates?
Taking plants as an example, humans often perceive them as a passive species, unemotive to stimulus.  But in reality, they have their own ways to communicate beyond our awareness. Plants communicate through their roots by secreting tiny amounts of chemicals into the soil all through the plant's root zone. These chemicals, send signals to every other living thing in the root zone. This project explores the exchange of ‘human’ and ‘plant’ language, bringing people to better understand what nature wants to communicate to us.

With a device called ‘Biodata Sonification’, it allows the translation of plants' signals into sounds where users can listen to the invisible biological processes occurring within plants. It measures microcurrent fluctuations occurring across the surface of a plant’s leaf and generates MIDI notes when a change in conductivity is detected.

The sounds are generated when a change is detected within the plant with a pitch corresponding to the amount of change. This can happen according to the plants’ condition, weather changes, and other external stimuli. This ‘Biodata Sonification’ process provides the possibility of translation from plant language to audio that people can perceive.

The installation looks deeper into the nature conservations in Cape Cod and bring the sounds of naturally grown plants into the museum space.

Four locations of nature conservation are targetted in which the biodata sonification device will be installed, and their sounds played in the museum space. Through this, the visitors are hoped to experience changes and distortions of the plant-generated sound in conjunction with the conditions of the living plants.

Furthermore, this explores how environmental changes have affected the sounds of the plants, imagining what they sound like in the past or the projected future. This installation intends to call the attention that nature is not a separate entity but coexists within our society.

Each speaker unit is coordinated according to a plant, and corresponds to a particular note. The changes of the sound is generated from the condition of the plant and external factors affecting the plant.