soft frequencies: amplifying sonic signals from plants, fungi and other beings

In a darkened gallery or a quiet park, sensors clamp onto leaves and roots, tiny electrodes or moisture meters, and suddenly the inaudible pulses of life become audible. A speaker crackles to life, mapping the subtle electrochemical flickers of the plant and translating to sound. A fern might hum with gentle sine-wave drones, a philodendron might trigger simple melodies or rhythmic pulses.

This is biosonification, the translation of biological data into sound, and it feels strangely intimate. Invisible fluctuations become ambient melodies, crackling pulses, harmonic textures, low atmospheric drones. Tiny changes in conductivity inside a leaf are transformed into pitch, rhythm, modulation, and tone through software, synthesizers, sensors, and algorithms, technologically reinterpreting life happening in real time into sound waves.

Importantly, these systems do not prove that plants are literally speaking or making music. A pothos is not composing ambient techno and mushrooms are not singing to humans. These projects reveal a growing cultural desire to listen beyond ourselves, beyond the human. Artists and technologists are increasingly building interfaces that attempt to translate forms of life that exceed human perception into emotional and aesthetic experiences humans can feel.

Tom Zahuranec routes amplified plant energy into handmade Tcherepnin synthesizers | image via Data Garden

Some of the earliest contemporary plant-sonification experiments emerged through projects like Data Garden and the now-iconic MIDI Sprout, developed by artists Joe Patitucci and Alex Tyson in the early 2010s. Their system attached electrodes to plants and translated conductivity fluctuations into MIDI information connected to synthesizers. Ferns, philodendrons, and tropical plants became generators of drifting ambient compositions and unpredictable melodic structures.

Data Garden Quartet was ‘revelatory’. Four living plants connected to a sonification system generate real-time plant music. Listeners reported hearing ‘slow, undulating musical gestures of plants rendered through technology’, sounding nothing like conventional music, but an undirected ambience. This project leaned on earlier influences, including Brian Eno’s 1970s generative music ideas and 1960s ‘biofeedback’ art. Even in the 1960s, CIA-linked polygraph expert Cleve Backster had hooked tropical leaves to a lie detector and marveled at their electrical activity, inspiring many to wonder if plants are ‘sensitive’ or even conscious. But Data Garden’s Patitucci stresses he and his collaborators are ‘artists more than scientists’ and often say ‘we don’t know!’ what it all means. Their goal was to foster wonder, not to claim plants literally feel emotions or speak to us. As they put it, their work serves to ‘foster understanding of plant consciousness through sharing this experience with people.’

Brainwave and plant music from The Secret Life of Plants (1976) | image via Data Garden

Other designers have turned plant wiring into playful installations. The French duo Scenocosme’s Akousmaflore is a ‘garden of living musical plants.’  In this interactive installation, touching a plant leaf or flower triggers a tone and each species sings with its own timbre. ‘Through Akousmaflore, plants sing to visitors and communicate their existence by a melody, a screech or an alluring vibration,’ explains the exhibit text. A mint leaf might produce a soft bell tone, a fern a bubbling synth sound. The visitor becomes a conductor of a patchwork of organic sounds. Similarly, artists like Mileece build ‘sonic jungles’, indoor rooms filled with moss, ferns and flowers whose touch or breath triggers ambient drones. In her long-running Soniferous Eden series (ongoing since 2007), lush groves of plants in an immersive dome ‘generate rich and dynamic soundscapes in response to the touch and presence of the participants’. Strikingly, visitors often quietly giggle or gasp as they feel vines twitch and twinkle with sound and are reminded of being enveloped by nature’s hidden communication.

Under the soil, artists are tuning in, too. Works like Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Poetics of Soil video sculptures use film and sound to reveal fungal networks and subterranean life. In one piece, an Amanita muscaria mushroom seems to pulse and glow, while a narrator (mycologist Merlin Sheldrake) speaks and a composed score knits with visuals to suggest the mushroom is ‘unveiling the hidden rhythms of the earth’s soil’. What we actually see are CGI threads of mycelium and oscillating lights, but the audio mix and rhythm imply a living respiration. And Italian studio Anecoica’s FUNGI takes it further, with 3D-printed ceramic sculptures (shaped like real mycorrhiza) that physically resonate with sound generated by actual fungal network data. They map geolocated records of soil fungi onto sound parameters, resulting in a haunting hymn. A local Aka people’s chant Song for Gathering Mushrooms is algorithmically reshaped by fungal data so that as the network grows (or as you walk among the sculptures), the melody warbles and evolves. In other words, the digital meshwork of spores literally guides the music.

Even microbial life gets its turn, in artist Maya Chowdhry’s recent Fathoming Fungal Frequencies installation, which uses electrodes on pink oyster mushrooms. As someone strokes the fungus or breathes near it, a generative soundscape swirls around the space. This biodata sonification ‘gives [fungi] a voice in relation to their own ecosystem, and potentially in relationship to the human,’ Chowdhry explains. In the video projection that accompanies her installation, the mushrooms seem to be the audience themselves. The camera viewpoint is low amidst the pink caps, as if we see the human interaction from the fungi’s perspective. Through it all, the dominant feeling is one of calm wonder and mutual curiosity rather than hype. The human visitor hears the fungi rustle; perhaps the mushrooms respond with subsonic vibrations turned audible.

In another experimental setup by Venezuelan artist Feno moss, algae, salt, conductive wires, and human touch become part of a temporary sonic ecosystem. Organic matter is arranged across shallow metallic containers and connected to responsive circuitry that transforms conductivity into evolving sound patterns. Hands glide slowly across damp surfaces while signals ripple through the system, producing textures that feel ritualistic. Moisture, pressure, friction, mineral content, and bodily interaction all shape the soundscape in real time.

What makes works like these compelling is their fragility. The setup appears unstable, almost provisional, as though the composition could dissolve with a change in humidity or the drying of moss. This instability becomes central to the experience. Biosonification projects often expose the delicate maintenance required to sustain connection between bodies, machines, and ecosystems. Sound emerges from attunement and responsiveness.

Sound practitioners such as Sonic Seed approach biosonification more as atmospheric composition. Working across field recording, modular synthesis, environmental acoustics, and experimental sound design, the studio explores how wind, vibration, metallic resonance, and organic movement can be translated into immersive auditory environments.

In a recent field recording shared by the team on Instagram, a metal fence in Lanzarote resonates with the wind while blades of grass softly strike the structure like tiny percussion instruments.

FUNGI by Anecoica | image via anecoica.net

Biosonification goes beyond plants and extends into broader environments, even the cosmos. Ecological designers dream up immersive soundscapes that let us eavesdrop on forests, oceans, or the sky. In Britain’s You:Matter exhibit (2025), visitors enter dimly lit rooms where wall screens and sculptures react to our presence. In Marshmallow Laser Feast’s We Live In An Ocean Of Air, for example, breath sensors visualize your exhaled carbon dioxide streaming toward a digital Sequoia tree. You watch your own breath feed the forest, literalized data revealing the reciprocity of human–plant respiration. Another installation by the London-based experiential art collective in the same show, titled A Breathing Planet, displays satellite data of Earth’s carbon dioxide fluctuations as a pulsing globe of light and sound. It emits a low hum in time with day-night cycles, so the planet itself feels like a breathing organism. These ambient sonifications make a kind of lullaby out of Earth’s systems. The rhythms of climate and biology become something you can almost sing to, underscoring that, in our era of climate anxiety, we yearn to feel connected. Dipping your head into a fog bubble or walking barefoot on projected tree patterns, as in Mileece’s Soniferous Eden, is like saying ‘I am here, listening.’

Atmospheres themselves are subjects. Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnophilia project, in collaboration with MIT researchers, is a spider-web concert: sheet lasers scan 3D spiderwebs, then algorithms assign musical tones to each strand. Navigating the web in VR produces a ‘spooky cacophony’, a faint orchestration like ambient Tim Burton music from inside the web. Saraceno’s mission is to ‘recalibrate our attention and senses to our nonhuman kin’. The web is an everyday architecture we mostly ignore, yet in Spider’s Canvas, Saraceno and his collaborators force us to appreciate its vibrations.

Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I by Marshmallow Laser Feast

Why is all this hearing of the unhearable so compelling now? Ecologists and sound scholars have coined terms like the Phonocene, coined by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret, to describe an era in which sound becomes a site of ecological thinking. Listening becomes a kind of activism. Active listening unfolds new forms of attention that demand empathy, slowing down, and mutual respect. When we train ourselves to hear the flutter of a leaf or the rhythm of atmospheric data, we are practicing care for a world that often feels silent and distant. This is why whale song recordings remain iconic: in the 1970s, bioacoustician Roger Payne gave humanity the first vinyl Songs of the Humpback Whale, an eerie soundtrack that crept into living rooms and instantly humanized whales. Suddenly, people felt whales as social, emotional creatures, reshaping conservation consciousness. Today’s plant-sonification devices play a similar role of ‘gift-giving,’ making a voice for beings normally unheard.

Critics caution that we do not mistake these sonifications for literal inter-species dialogue. Plants aren’t using music like humans, rather, we are projecting meaning onto converted data. The translation filters nature through algorithms, interfaces and human aesthetics. In practice, turning the bio-conductivity of a plant into a MIDI note requires creative choices. Which leaf do we choose to listen to? What scale? What tempo? The answers to these questions lead to the composition of a human art piece that can also be conceived as a ‘natural’ recording, without diminishing its value.

What these projects do is frame ecological awareness in emotional terms and the feeling of this fragility too. Machines must be tended (wet the soil if signals wane), sensors recalibrated, and batteries recharged, one realizes how delicate the setup is. This maintenance is part of caring for the instrument, which becomes caring for the ecosystem it represents.

pink oyster mushroom driving the visualisation | Fathoming Fungal Frequencies by Maya Chowdhry

All the while, biosonification gestures toward the paradox that humans are desperate for nonhuman intimacy, yet such communication inevitably fails to fully bridge the divide. Philosopher Anna Tsing reminds us that mushrooms or microbes have ways of being that elude our grasp and that giving them a ‘voice’ is also giving voice to our own hope for connection. Similarly, technology itself is ambivalent. Thinkers like James Bridle argue that as machines mediate our world, we must rethink them not just as tools but as part of a network of intelligences, humans, plants, AI, coexisting.

The aesthetic result remains hauntingly beautiful. A room with softly chiming plant tones feels like a lullaby from the Earth, gentle, ephemeral, full of longing, offering respite from digital fatigue, standing in the place of glowing screens and pulsing notifications. In times of ecological crisis and social disconnection, when the phrase ‘touch grass’ has become shorthand for escaping the psychological saturation of online culture, people crave sensory contact with life’s undercurrents. Artists offer listening as a form of attention, the simplest, most ancient technology of all.

In the end, biosonification is as much about our cultural moment as it is about plants. It resonates in an age of ecological anxiety and digital burnout because it offers a soft interface to the wild. Yet it also admits its own impossibility, showing us how much we do not know and maybe never can. The song of a plant reminds us that life pulses all around. As we huddle around our speakers, tuning into chlorophyll’s breath, we realize that the act of listening itself has become a gentle protest and a plea, a wish to belong to something larger.

analogue and digital screens | Fathoming Fungal Frequencies by Maya Chowdhry

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s We Live in an Ocean of Air, Video Edition – Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data, Athens, Greece, 2022 | image via Marshmallow Laser Feast

Data Garden’s Plantwave | image via Plantwave

imave via Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnophilia

This article was originally published by Designboom.

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