Chlorophyll Songwriter: An update to an earlier post about Sam Cusumano's music-playing philodendron

Back in late April, the < fidget > gallery in Philadelphia hosted Sam Cusumano and his latest project born out of the incubator that is Electricity for Progress. It was part of Philly Tech Week. There was excitement in the air. Enough excitement that his Philodendron seemed to respond to it! It was a cool exhibit.

 

The < fidget > gallery was noisy when I visited--Cusumano's exhibit was one of several sound related exhibits in the gallery that night. The lighting was also low, but that helped our brains to focus on auditory stimulus rather than visual. I still managed to record a few seconds of usable footage.  I titled the video Chlorophyl Songwriter--if that sounds stupid, blame me, not Cusumano.
 
This was actually the second time that Cusumano was displaying plants that could play music. The first time was a week earlier at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Megawords, the experimental media project organized by Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy, invited Data Garden to be part of a joint exhibit. Data Garden was a quartet of plants. You can listen to the music from the exhibit here, and Sam explains things here.

What I saw seemed simple enough: sensors measuring conductivity on the leaves of the Philodendron were connected to a tablet computer and synthesizer.  The tablet computer displayed the data coming in from the sensors. The synthesizer translated this data into sound. The complicated stuff--programming, recording, testing--probably had taken the past few weeks or months. Impressive.

The wild part was listening to the plant "at rest" for a few seconds, and then listening to the plant "responding." It was clear that simply standing very close to the plant (perhaps breathing on the leaves, or causing a gust of air to momentarily increase evaporation on the leaf surface) was enough to change the leaf conductivity and therefore the music. Two guys caused a dramatic effect when they ran their hands through the leaves for several seconds.

It was something pretty magical--music from the interaction of two very different species--and I hope Cusumano finds a way to create a more permanent exhibit somewhere I can visit. If not, I'll have to commission him to make one for me.