研究・産学官民連携 Research

Discovering melodic patterns in the movement of plants

Research Projects and Initiatives

Recent Studies at Faculty of Design

Discovering melodic patterns in the movement of plants

Department of Communication Design Science, Faculty of Design
Professor Mamoru Fujieda

For the last twenty years or so, I have been using plants to compose music. I have developed a series of compositions called Patterns of Plant, in which electrodes are attached to the leaves and stalks of plants, and the change in electric potential is read as musical data. This series began when I learned about the Plantron device invented by media artist Yūji DŌGANE in his study of orchid ecosystems.

This device makes it possible to read and analyze the variation in potential generated by a plant in real time. While this change is very subtle and its behavior is chaotic, Plantron is connected to brain-wave analysis software that can visualize this behavior and output it as musical data. When realized as sound, this data might be something like the “voice of the plant.” This is the thought that spurred my involvement in sound installations featuring the Plantron at galleries and museums, together with DŌGANE.

Fig. 1: sound installation Paphio in My Life (2007)
collaboration work with Yuji Dogane at NTT Inter Communication Center [ICC]

Over the course of doing these sound installations, it occurred to me once that I might be able to interpret the sequences of sounds converted from variations in potential as melodies. I immediately got to work creating a program that could compose melodic patterns using recorded electric potential data as input, and thus begun the Patterns of Plant series. After that, I composed many “collections” for keyboard and various kinds of instruments and released many CDs.

Fig. 2: Patterns of Plants II (TZADIK, USA, 2009)

Fig. 3: Patterns of Plants, played on the clavichord

Fig. 4: Patterns of Plants, played on the Gothic harp

Fig. 5: Patterns of Plants (Pinna Records, USA, 2016)

The title Patterns of Plant is an homage to Celtic decorative art, which uses the stalks and leaves of plants as motifs. Just as Celtic patterns express the infinite process of growth and transformation, the music of Patterns of Plant has also grown and transformed in unexpected ways in recent years. In 2016, Sarah Cahill performed Patterns of Plant on the piano all day long for five days at the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York. The performance, which evoked Noguchi’s words, “When I am face-to-face with natural stone, it begins to speak.” was like a dialogue between Patterns of Plant and his sculptures.

In 2018, as part of a National Taiwan University artist residency project, I composed Patterns of Plant pieces from Taiwanese tea, based on potential variation data collected from tea plants in the university’s experimental farm. It was performed at the university on the guzheng (a Chinese zither) and the piano. This may be the beginning of a future connection between the Patterns of Plant of tea and the cultural endeavor known as “the art of tea.”

In this compositional process of discovering patterns in the subtle changes in plants’ electric potential and transforming the sequences and accumulations of those patterns into music, I feel as if I are endlessly interweaving ecological designs. I hope that Patterns of Plant as ecological practice goes on to connect with more forms of artistic expression in the future.

Fig. 6: Performance of Patterns of Plants at The Noguchi Museum in NYC (piano: Sarah Cahill)

Fig. 7: Collecting data from the tea tree in the experimental farm, Taiwan University

Fig. 8: Patterns of Plants, the Taiwan Tea Collection played on the GuZheng by Yi-Chieh Jay Lai at NTU Center for the Arts

■Inquiries
Department of Communication Design Science, Faculty of Design
Professor Mamoru Fujieda