Entering Into a Sonic Intra-Active Quantum Relation with Plant Life

1.1 Becoming With

If something shimmers, it shines with a faint, unsteady light or has an unclear, unsteady appearance. (English translation of “miroiter” | Collins French-English Dictionary).

This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intersect. This is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live. (Nick Cave in Forsyth & Pollard, 2014).

As a feminist sound and performance artist, researcher, and writer, I am embracing the speculative, the obscure, the intuitive, and the immanent in sound practice with sensory approaches to compose immersive 3D spatial design architecture for audio-visual spaces as sound art, electronic musical scores, and sensory environments with plant life. These research-creation projects are cultivated to make perceptible to the human senses, the slow and subtle sonic intra-relations and other-than human sonic undulations from plant life. From a speculative theoretical perspective, this approach facilitates a shift in perception through the sonic agency with plant life and the musical parameters between the non-human–machine–human relational understanding that plants have always been present and active participants through world-building.

The roots of my research as a sound artist are embedded in the experience of listening to sound matter as an experience in space and is an explicit concern. The listener’s phenomenological experience of the acoustic potential of both the room and the instrumental or electronic forces employed in the sound artwork helped me make decisions regarding content, discreet and semantic pitch choices, rhythm, tempo, form through a 3D spatial design architecture.

The acoustic work of experimental musician, John Cage, Electronic Music Composer, Pauline Oliveros, Minimalist Electronic Music Composer, Eliane Radigue and the theoretical writing of Pauline Oliveros, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin (to name a few) has contributed to qualifying sound matter to describe and convey what is now termed Quantum Listening – thus revealing the instrumental, microtonal, electronic forces, and intensities brought into a broader architectural space in a mind–body relation.

The more-than-human relationship with plant life amplifies the growing enquiry into the sonic matter, posthuman thinking, and new materialist concerns, perceptual science capable of generating new expressions in audio-visual works and more robustly connected to the many ways that we are intra-connected to the world through an acoustic perspective – by which sound moves through space in a field of forces and intensities through quantum entanglements, assemblage in the simplest terms.

I am making observations through a quantum entanglement to listen deeply from a minimalist position – the timbre, texture, tuning temperament, psychoacoustics, harmony, inharmonics of plant communication, and explore broader theories and texts in the phenomenology of plants (the study of direct experience). I am a part of a performance collective named: CEREUS and my co-composer, Alexandre Pépin, and I are working together to create acoustic ecologies of the Anthropocene as a transversal site for building resilience in ecological continuity, community building, and storytelling in acoustic ecologies. We aim to listen to plant sounds as a mesh of relationships that form an ecology in order to find expression in many different fields that characterize a soundscape, which is a form of bioacoustics. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

Rota Festival, Centro Negra AADK, Blanca, Murcia. Note: Cereus in-concert capturing live plants in performance with us. Teatro Victoria, Blanca, Murcia, Spain. © Ana Carucci (2023).

1.2 Interactive Art Installation

CEREUS is deeply interested in the creation of a number of interactive art installations designed to ask questions such as: What does it mean to be alive in a symbiotic neo-materialist sensing modality and have agency? How can one slow down through deep listening methods and listen to plant voices that have been looked upon as mere objects? What does it mean to be in dialogue with something that does not share the same language or temporal reality? And once we acknowledge the aliveness of something, what are the ethical implications of that recognition?

This research is geared towards listening and learning from these voices and finding ways to engage with the public with the intention of (re)thinking and (re)situating our relationship with the natural world. Through the art of sonification, we aim to convey audio information or perceptualize data through a spatialized 3D sonic architecture. Auditory perception has advantages in temporal, spatial, amplitude, and frequency resolution that open possibilities as an alternative or complement to visualization techniques for deep listening techniques in an immersive sonic environment.

1.3 Methodologies

We use sensors with plants to enter into a sonic intra-relation with a plant as an ongoing exploration wired into the world of Modular Synthesis – an electronic music world of the modular intra-acting with the live acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to create electronic patterns of sounds designed by humans, emitted by machines to present in different in-gallery installations. In our future research development, besides listening and responding to the sonification of plant life, we aim to observe and develop sense phenomena such as soil temperature, soil humidity, particulate matter in the air, light levels, and air temperature/humidity in specific situated 3D spatial audio-visual installation environments.

As impetus for the sculptural 3D spatial architectural form and design of this work, we are inspired to bring a sense of space and depth to our generative audio mixing concepts and use spatial audio design as a perceptual immersive mixing tool; by redefining the way of mixing where you intuitively position objects in spaces and let the acoustic signature of the room build the desired depth of listening directly to the viewer. We wish to create acoustic space (reverberation) that requires recognition of the aliveness of plant life and to place the significance of plants as individual beings and sentient life.

This research also recognizes that different cultures (specifically Indigenous cultures worldwide) do not share the Western human-centric position of plant life and nature but rather see nature as possessing more-than-human intelligence. As Sound Artists, we use technology as a tool to place human and non-human into a dialogical relationship, where both voices are equal despite perceived differences.

The audio data collected by various plant life form the foundation of a number of sonic artworks that materialize these data both independently and with collaborators. The goal of the CEREUS project is to create artworks generated by the different spatial environments that will simultaneously express the complexity and liveliness of plants in a symbiotic relation, allowing the public to engage and co-exist in the immersive experience.

This research is not designed to replace real-life experiences of the natural world, but rather to create the context for perceiving, intellectualizing, materializing, and understanding the liveliness and intelligence embedded within the naturalized other, as a way of initiating a deeper sense of empathy and understanding of the workings of more-than-human minds and beings in the natural world.

1.4 Research is Ceremony

What happens when technology is implied in creating sound matter with plants and why would we plant the act of resilience to survive on a collapsing planet? Research is ceremony through indigenous research methods (Wilson, 2020). As an Indigenous researcher, Wilson maintains that indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to all our relations, and we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis, and the way we present information. Thus, my first personal encounter that developed into this remarkable journey began when I captured my first sound recording of the cactus plant variety named botanically San Pedro Cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi)^[2] in 2022. I was drawn to this night blooming cereus cactus^[3] because most types of night blooming cereus are fragrant and seductively beautiful, yet their lifespan is so fleeting (Beaulieu, 2022). All are perennial plant life where they natively grow. The San Pedro Cactus is a striking plant. It has a bluish-green hue, distinct spiny ribs, and can grow up to incredible, tree-like heights in the wild. I have no idea how it arrived in my garden. It has been here a long time because it is a mature plant, and the cactus blooms only during the summer months where heavily perfumed flowers invite propagators such as bees, wasps, and other insects to taste, smell, and drink its nectar. The flowers exist for a few hours from dusk to dawn and, over time, I have understood this plant’s potentiality and life forces. I have realized that all plant beings were here on this planet far before humans, and their wisdom is beyond our own limited human understanding.

From this personal perspective, vegetal matter knows how to heal sickness, how to mend and restore health, and how to nourish and feed life as Indigenous people have spoken about. They know how to adapt and evolve and have been witness to the ages of life on Earth. Although I am not of Indigenous ancestry, I carry this knowledge into my sound composition research and onto the discursive page as I write this text, almost pre-composing the plant meta-language of a graphic score notation.

2.1 The Cracks in the Sensorium

Cosmopolitics is now the common situation for all collectives. There is no common world, and yet it has to be composed, nonetheless. (Bruno Latour, 2004)

Cosmopolitics, a conceptual framework that acknowledges more-than-human beings as active agents rather than mere objects outside of human society, has been made visible by science studies theorists such as Haraway (2012), Latour (2004), and Stengers (2005). In the journal article, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism” (de Castro, 1998), a widely noted ethnographic exploration illustrates the pragmatic relations of the Indigenous Amerindian communities whose engagement with other species de Castro categorizes as a form of perspectivism.^[6]

This critical text encompasses an understanding that the world is populated with perceptions of reality from distinct points of view supported by corporeal diversity. Other-than humans are documented as being infused with spirit, according to Indigenous knowledge keepers. Amerindian perspectives see animals, creatures, critters, and plant life as persons. This specific cosmology is geographically and culturally also situated in Amazonian cosmologies as an epistemological approach that is useful to explain how cosmopolitics points out that humans do not go into conflicts with their perspectives on things; they go into them along with the non-human things that make them act (Latour, 2004). In this modality, personification, one can argue, assigns human-like traits to non-human things, including inanimate objects, ideas, or animals.

In the eco-political cosmos of plants, notes the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers (2010, p. vii), humans and nonhumans emerge as an integrative practice for navigating our fractured landscape of knowledge. For Stengers, I propose that this fractured landscape refers to the fissure (or cracks) between facts and values, subjects and objects, nature and society, time and history, or world and representation. These cracks in the sensorium reminds us that by treating plants as objects, aesthetics such as these are modalities that position human behaviour as indifferent, apathetic, and almost hostile. For Stengers (2010), physics has been reduced to a certain kind of physics. Stengers (2010, p. 175) emphasizes: “the triumph over the physics of laws over the physics of phenomena.”

Rather than saying that there are no physical laws, Stengers refers us a more complex picture of the entanglement. Stengers invites us to think with an ecological and historical conception of physics that includes the physics of phenomena and the physics of laws. She proposes that the physics of laws are themselves immanent to the ecological circumstances from within which phenomena intra-act. Therefore, when listening to sound matter generated by humans in an intra-relation with plants, technologies of all kinds – no matter what their use, are dynamic and lively agencies, bringing forth a series of unpredictable constraints, requirements, and possibilities in phenomena that cannot be theorized in terms of their human usefulness alone.

In the book, Dark Ecology (Morton, 2016), ecology activist, Timothy Morton, writes: “Dark Ecology shall argue that there are layers of attunement to ecological reality more accurate than what is habitual in the media, in the academy, and in society at large.”

We are, I propose, captured by one another under the influence of musicology, and we exert influence on each other through resonant sound matter that is wrapped up in the event. As musicians and sound artists, I would speculate, we are nuanced through technical assemblages that are composed in a (pre)determined world according to Morton but keep us invested in the layers of attunement that manifest within ecological phenomena.

2.2 The Evolving World of Modular Synthesis

CÍON |‘sʌɪən’ | noun (biology) young shoot or stem useful for sprouting or forming new roots, a descendant of a noble family. (Instruo Synthesizers, n.d.) (Instruo, Specialist Synthesizers)

In turn, a modular synthesizer or Eurorack is technically an electronic musical instrument that consists of a multitude of different components (modules) that are combined to create electronic patterns of sounds designed by humans, emitted by machines. The individual modules are connected via patch cables, knobs, switches, sliders, and patch bays and other electronic sound hardware. Simply put, there are advantages to having a modular system because most modules have a plethora of inputs and outputs that can be patched together in any number of ways to produce a constellation of electronic acoustic indeterminate soundscapes. This can open up more new ways of creating and manipulating sounds than on a traditional synthesizer. Captured samples of plant life are either played live and/or stored on a solid-state device as a plant (seed) bank of differential and distinct inharmonic sound recordings. The modules operate as MIDI controllers, equipping sound artists who play a synth or DAW to intra-act with sonic matter from plants with the help of sensors attached to the leaves or stem of a plant that picks up these frequencies and can be amplified in a live performance to create a simultaneous collective listening.

2.3 Simultaneous Collective Listening

Through modular synthesizers, to intra-act with spaces and places through forms of sound composition and live improvisation is indeterminate and abstracted as the plants behave differently dependent on their physical well-being at the time under different spatial conditions. Speculative inquiry into the behavioural relationship with plants becomes an intimate process of simultaneous collective listening and the decoding of sounds and spatiality by a single human proposes the musical possibility of establishing proximity with the non-human. Relationally, one enters into a symbiotic relationship of being attentive to one life form with the other to arouse the sensory body to the limitations of human perception.

This mind–body relation enters into play where human bodies are closely entangled with vegetal matter embedded within an acoustic narrative. Sound synthesis, I propose, can be particularly suitable for this activation and creating synchronous oscillations in the intra-action. This close awareness or shared experience can create an emotional and affective connection for both protagonists in a live soundscape composition. The vagueness of plant language in its own autonomous existence can be affectively felt, heard by the listener arousing the sensory bodies of both plant life and humans. Through deep listening, a musical experience is then expanded on and modulated with the aid of technology.

Philosopher, Whitehead’s (2010) concept of creativity^[7] proposes, according to Australian professor and author, Rousell (2022), “a novel togetherness of creaturely experience where nothing has executive control and everything that happens is the mark of a creative accident.”

In short, paraphrasing Whitehead’s “concept of creativity” for sensing creaturely relations at the nexus of artistic practice, I argue, can open up a sonic field of creative activity that I propose generates novel musical contrasts, and modulates intensities of experience in acoustic soundscapes.

2.4 Transcendent Waves

Listen to everything until it all belongs together, and you are a part of it. (Oliveros, 2010)

For me, intra-action is the foundation of listening and creativity through my on-going and past academic research. Through the concept of biophony, the collective sound of vegetal matter amplified in each given environment refers to a component of the soundscape (Laschimke et al., 2006). In this more-than human conduit, one can analyse how a plant behaves and what we learn from the transcendent waves of their way of living. From a human perspective, we are all connected by hearing, listening, and the scientific consensus of “translation.”

2.5 Methodology

In concert, the captured recordings of the soundscape/s reflect crucial moments from which “getting lost” in the electronic acoustic waves reflects how responsively we play in responding to plant sound data – offering inputs to be interpreted, reflected upon, that merit a speculative inquiry. Philosophically, by applying the notion of audio patching cables as wander lines, I see these sonic conduits with patching cables as “errant”^[8] in the way that inspired French philosopher Felix Guattari in his formulation of “lines of flight” (Guattari, 2015). British scholar, Colman (2011) states: “Closely linked to Deleuze (and Guattari’s) concepts of ‘multiplicity’, ‘experience’ and ‘rhizomatics,’ the concept of ‘affect’ should also be considered in relation to the concepts of ‘arborescence’ and ‘lines of flight.’”

Situated as part of the Deleuzian and of becoming,^[9] the molecular thresholds of bodies and things as events are described by Deleuze in terms of affective happenings; occasions where things and bodies are altered (Colman, 2011). Further, in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2013), Manuel DeLanda describes the line of flight as an operator that transcends the actual and ascends to the virtual (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The Cereus cactus flower. Note: The Cereus cactus flower is sending biofeedback which is feeding the Arturia Microfreak experimental hybrid synthesizer with midi data. ©julianaespanakeller (2023).

In addition, the notion of sonic tracings feeds this mapping process to the processual work of the French philosopher, Fernand Deligny whose conviction in “getting lost” is a performative dis/humanism (Deligny, 2016). This refusal to fix/explain/contain biofeedback travelling through a patching cable is proposed here merely an opening of the acoustic cracks that resonate in a mutual relation to nature.

Fugitive neo-materialist scholar and Yoruba poet, Bayo Akomolafe, presupposes that humility is a way of knowing that refuses to privilege the knower over the known. He goes further to say that humility is a multi-species arrangement in which “knowing is the fragile trafficking of edges and seemingly determinate borders in a rapturous, open-ended, intra-active, mycorrhizal indermi-verse” (Akomolafe, 2023).

We as humans, Akomolafe argues, are part of a sensorium that characterizes a co-emergent, co-reificatory topos of relations – a summoning into co-substantiating intra-actions, a turning with/in together, a topos, shaped by desire and possibility (Akomolafe, 2023). This, I would add in the sensorium, is co-composed as an acoustic ecology of nature that is shaped by our environment, with plants as our beings of co-analysis.

Botanist, author, professor, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in the United States, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), brings a sense of wonder and humility for intelligence found in all kinds of life from the biosphere that we use to name and imagine as inanimate of the natural and scientific world. For sound artists, this qualitative speculation can be extended further by co-composing with plants to their more-than-human life.

In times when onto-political struggles over life itself have become matters of planetary survival, we are at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings. Biologists are now able to trace the complex coexistences and interrelationships of microorganisms with each other as well as with plants, beyond the basic facts that they require water and earth to stay alive and are also needed for oxygen. Electromagnetic waves emitted by plants and tracked as musical notes, transcend where matters of desire, agency, feeling, value and concern are, and we propose, are not separable in human and non-human worlds.

2.6 Zoning in and Cultivating a State of Flow

Vibrations sound both heard and unheard, Vibrations both seen and unseen, Infinite Presence, Deep highway rays of communication, With/to the All universe, Even its unknown duality phases. (Ra, 1972)

Through audio emissions, I propose that plants are embedded with quantum-pulsations of physical energy that can quite possibly indicate a transmission of feeling to expose a radically affective ecological aesthetics that extends across all scales and modes of existence (molecular, cellular, planetary, cosmological) through which perhaps, quantum creativity emitted by plants can therefore perform a principal role as a co-composer of sound matter (Milburn & Johnson, 1966). In an expanding acoustic field, plants producing novel patterns of togetherness under shifting environmental conditions may generate new ecological and sensory values of existence. Each event implicates a novel togetherness, amongst plants that reverberate across the universe as a vibratory continuum of musical activity. The concept of novel togetherness is expanded on by Whitehead throughout his book Process and Reality (2010).

When plants are connected to sensors, ultrasonic vibrations of (20–100 kHz) can be measured. Plants release audio emissions from different organs and at different growth stages or respond therefore to different situations.

As water travels through the plants’ xylem ^[10] tubes, which help keep them hydrated, air bubbles will form and explode, generating small vibrations. Previous studies have picked up these waves, but only through devices attached directly to plants. Biologist, Gagliano (2012) states that: “the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think – capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory” is research that is trying to uphold whether plants can, for instance, learn or demonstrate their own type of sentience. Thus, plants do not perceive or “feel” pain the same way that animals do because they lack a nervous system and brain.

A raspberry pi device PlantWave (Data Garden, 2023) detects slight electrical variations in a plant via two-electrode sensors/clips placed on the leaves. These variations are graphed as a wave form, which is translated into pitch messages that play musical instruments. This device measures microfluctuations in conductivity between two points on a plant. The amount of conductivity between these two points is largely related to how much water there is between them. This changes as plants photosynthesize and move chloroplasts around. The variation is then graphed over time, which produces a sound wave. That sound wave is then translated into pitch.^[11] Then those pitch messages are routed to control instruments such as a modular synthesizer or keyboard. Each note heard is an expression of a change happening within the plant at the moment. The greater the distance between two adjacent notes, the greater the change that is happening within the plant (Data Garden, 2018). See Figure 3.

Figure 3

An example of a Cactus that grows in my garden in Spain. Note: The electronic clips attached to plant life detect slight electrical variations in a plant via two-electrode sensors placed on the leaves. From my garden in Spain: Cereus, (San Pedro) ©julianaespanakeller (2023).

Accordingly, different plants will produce different patterns, melodies, and, in fact, different leaves within the same plant can produce different patterns. Over time, even those patterns will change. Rather than switching from plant to plant, experimenting with an individual plant and tuning into its shift in patterns over longer periods of time is being tested in this sonic research. In addition to these changes in patterns, there are some instruments that will only trigger when a plant displays an especially high amount of activity. This is a sign of a significant shift in activity of the plant being activated.

There are no two plants that produce exactly the same patterns. In fact, no two leaves within the same plant produce the same patterns. From an ecological perspective, each plant seems to be tuned to a frequency that most serves its survival. For example, when a plant is threatened, some plants will release a toxin in their leaves when they hear another nearby plant being munched on by a caterpillar. A study from the Linnean Society of London has shown that when Acacia trees are being eaten, they release chemicals that signal to other Acacia trees to produce toxic tannins on their leaves. Interestingly, free-roaming giraffes were observed avoiding eating from downwind Acacia trees, suggesting that they could detect the airborne chemicals and knew the trees were toxic (The Linnean Society, n.d.).

In another significant discovery, plants can also communicate with certain animals to defend themselves. When corn is being eaten by caterpillars, it emits a chemical distress call that attracts parasitoid wasps. The wasps then attack the caterpillars by injecting them with venom and their eggs, so the caterpillars are consumed from within by the hatched wasp larvae (ScienceDaily, 1999). In summary, plants can sense when nearby plants are being attacked and release toxins or send signals to other plants and animals to help defend themselves, demonstrating a form of plant intelligence and communication (Schlanger, 2024).

Plants defend themselves from predators through various mechanisms like mechanical defences, chemical defences, and indirect defences. Mechanical defences include thorns, spines, and hard shells that deter herbivores by causing physical damage (War et al., 2012). Chemical defences involve the production of toxins like alkaloids and glycosides that are toxic to animals ingesting them. Indirect defences include releasing volatile compounds that attract natural enemies of herbivores like parasitoids, which eventually kill the predators. These defence strategies help plants survive in a world where they can’t move away from threats that are all around them (LibreTexts Biology, 2022).

Although plants have the capacity to respond to sound, there is insufficient data supporting them listening to and responding to their own sound waves, although this is currently being challenged by many scientists (Data Garden, 2018). As slight fluctuations in the conductivity of the plant with electronic sensors are graphing these fluctuations as wave forms, translating them into pitch, those pitch messages are translated. Therefore, a plant does not necessarily sound like a specific harmonic but through modulation amplifies their power through acoustic technology and sonic tracing. The electronic circuitry used is the same as that which is used in a lie detector. The device is called a psychogalvanometer, and it measures galvanic resistance over time (Farlex, n.d.). Lie detectors were first applied to plants by Plant Scientist, Cleve Backster in the 1960s. Backster claimed that his experiments showed evidence that plants not only respond to physical and chemical stimuli but also are capable of knowing the emotions and thoughts of entities around them. This perception of plants became known as the Backster Effect (Backster, 2003).

2.7 Plant Life is our Motivator in an Acoustic Ecology

As we modulate plant life through the sonic tracings between live vegetal entanglements and the human world, intra-action should be understood as bidirectional as well as errant: how are humans listening and, through listening, intra-relating with our environment; and how is our sonic environment calling upon us, triggering us to act and react? Within sound studies, there is a reservoir of sound possibilities, sonic instrumentation, thereby, for us, modulating vibrational effects. The aim of this article is to cultivate a mediated relationship between human–machine–non-human beings in their environment as a becoming where learning occurs when carefully chosen experiences are supported by philosophical, metaphysical reflection, and through participatory musical synthesis.

From an evolutionary perspective, the reception and processing of quantum energy embedded in sound waves is advantageous, as co-composing with plants allows us to try to experience how and why plants sense sound in their environments. Key questions clearly reside in the information a plant carries, which is slowly unfolding through plant science. By attributing plant characteristics to plants as Kimmerer and Wilson share from a more Indigenous perspective, what is troublesome is to suggest that plant matter has no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. This denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself and being (re)evaluated, (re)generated as plant intelligence.

This potential upholds an ecological awareness that forces us to think about a (re)worlding and (re)wilding or a “third landscape” as a radical vision of what ecological thought can be (Clément, 2004). French, Landscape Architect, Gilles Clément asks us not to seek nature in remote mountain tops, but find it instead in the midst of our cities and suburbs. He asks us to observe degraded built landscapes, leftover land plots, suburban yards, old, cemented parking lots, municipal drainage channels; this also reminds me of the plants that we keep in our city flats.

We are asked to observe these living beings not as useless remnants but as territories of vast potential. We pass them every day; their ordinariness is what makes them special, and they are embedded in the fabric of lives, shaping our most recurring images of nature. Clément calls these fragments the Third Landscape, the sum of all the human-disturbed land through which natural processes still occur. As sound artists, looking for plant species that thrive in these kinds of environments is enlightening. It helps us to look at our cities with fresh eyes, by (re)vising our attention to plants through horticulture and ecology, to work with plant species that are classified as weeds – those plants species that usually crowd out cultivated plants – and propose to listen to these plant beings, which are thriving in obscure and harsh conditions, and capture what they are telling us.

In an era of climate change, the variety of species that grow in these spaces and how they interweave to form a dense carpet in our immediate field of view in the urban landscape is to populate or enter through the cracks of the sensorium. Understanding plant life as communities of compatible species that cover the ground in interlocking layers is vital. What can plants tell us about (re)silience and hope, as we (re)establish our connections to non-human beings whose life forces are thriving in the biosphere?