Plant Choir

This piece is an experiment for which I used an unwanted noise that I captured during a field recording trip in the Harz Mountains. A steam locomotive regularly passes over the “Brocken,” often emitting its characteristic tonal horn sound. In a natural soundscape, this wasn’t what I had been looking for and normally I would have deleted this sound. That gave me the idea to recycle the audio and transform the sound of the horn into a short composition using effect chains and plant sonification.

To achieve this, I mainly used granular synthesis and after some tweaking, the horn sound transformed into something that sounded like a choir. The arrangement and notation of the piece were played by a houseplant. I connected it with sensors that convert the plant’s internal electrical and biological processes into midi notes. This has resulted in a “nature audio recycling”: a signal that is actually unusable has become the basis for something beautiful, performed by nature itself.