Plant Music
By: Larry Lootsteen
No, not Robert Plant. And no, not the plant that musicians claim ‘helps’ them create!
Mileece Petre is a Los Angeles-based musician who has developed music by attaching electrodes to plants and capturing and converting signals to sound. Here’s an example – Fern:
Mileece Petre, a 35-year-old English artist and musician known professionally as Mileece, is a plant whisperer of sorts. In a digital-age spin on “The Secret Life of Plants,” the 1973 book that suggested plants are sentient, she attaches electrodes to leaves. The electromagnetic current is fed into software she wrote that turns the data into musical notes, so a garden becomes an orchestra (she especially likes philodendrons; their hearty leaves offer better support for the electrodes).
She has performed this year at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work has been exhibited at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in England. She has also recorded an album of computer music, “Formations,” which, while not starring any begonias, was “dedicated to the plants.”