This gig is plant-based

Tarun Nayar makes music with flowers, leaves, roots and mushrooms. See how he plugs into nature, and how it responds

- Christalle Fernandes

For most musicians, a sound-check before a concert means making sure your instruments sound good. But for Tarun Nayar, the process is a little different. Electrodes are rigged up to banyan tree leaves, clipped to the petals of iris flowers, plugged into oyster mushrooms or whatever he’s picked as his instruments that day.

The electrodes record changes in a plant’s electrical activity and convert them into MIDI data. So far, so geeky. But Nayar has assigned different musical values — notes, beats, pitches — to each data point, so the feed can be viewed as a piece of music. The sounds come out as beeps and bloops, the stream of feedback creates an ambient soundscape.

“Any spike in activity between the electrodes — due to photosynthesis, or shifts in metabolic activity — is picked up by the synthesiser,” he says. The more the metabolic activity in the plant, the more electrical activity it generates. Even when plucked, plants and fungi remain electrically active for hours, sometimes weeks — making it possible to draw, say, a ballad from a bouquet. “So, the plants are not ‘making music’, we're making music with plants.”

It’s a collab we didn’t know we needed. Nayar likens it to heartbeat of the organism. So, what’s it like to press your ear up against a forest?