Plants be the new music artists

A plant music album, made up of music extracted from cactus, lemon and almond plants by a recording device, has tracks for both your workout and meditation playlists

We’ve all studied basic plant processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. But did you know that plants can also make music? Yes, you read that right. Notes by Nature, the world’s first plant album, was launched earlier this year.

Olive plant and coconut sapling

Yash Kulshrestha and Ananda Sen, the national creative heads of a t o m network, are behind it.  “Yash contacted me about a year ago with an idea for an ad campaign for Vatika UAE, and we decided to make a meditative music album using plants,” says Sharukh Makani, the album’s music producer. They began by borrowing five plants from a local plant vendor, a cactus, a lemon, an almond, an olive and a coconut. They also acquired a device that converts the pulse of a plant into music and created five tracks named Hudu, Bliss, Aman, Serenity and Nirvana, corresponding with the plants. “Since it was such an alien concept and a device that we hadn’t even heard of until a while ago, it took my friend Mehar Chumble, my co-music producer, and myself about two weeks to understand the functionality, settings and recording techniques to start tracking for the album,” Makani says.

Sharukh Makani, music producer and composer

They needed to use different methods to record each track and each plant, because the music dispensed changed depending on the plants’ mood. “We’d sometimes let the plants sing for minutes at a time, then pick the section that sounded musical and catchy to us. We’d have to layer it and have the plant sing over it again. We used digital software to extract specific sections, melodies, grooves, beats, or rhythms from what the plants had given us. We’d also water a plant while it was being recorded to add variation to the music. Some sections were recorded while the plant was in direct sunlight, and others at night. We would then repeat this process until the track sounded enjoyable,” Makani explains. One of their biggest obstacles was getting a steady tempo for the tracks and the composers had to search for the section that sounded the most coherent and consistent. At the same time, they didn’t want to interfere with the plants’ music-making process. It took them over six months to bring Notes by Nature to fruition. One Tree Planted, a non-profit organisation, will plant a tree for every 1,000 plays of the album. So, the more you listen, the greener the world becomes.

Cactus

How it works
The music is relaxing and calming enough for repeated listens, and it might even help you fall asleep. It can be played as background music while meditating, and also while participating in a fitness activity. The cactus audio was the most enjoyable because it had variations and was slightly more upbeat than the others. The lemon, almond, olive and coconut audios were more soothing, making them ideal to accompany meditation or work.

What: Notes by Nature
Where: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and SoundCloud

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