The Secret Life of Music for Plants
A retrospective on hippier times, cybernetics, and imagined botanical futures
Before we dive into this month’s Vision, get cozy, plug in your headphones, and put this track on to accompany your reading. Oh and if you haven’t yet, do subscribe.
Light and vibey, perfect for a Sunday gardening session. The album Plant Music by the Baroque Bouquet is interesting as it was not composed with you or me in mind as listeners, but the plants themselves. We’ve all heard that playing music is good for plant growth. While false, that farmer’s tale and a whole heap of other botanical woo-woo do have an interesting origin, and it’s not where you might think. Spoiler alert: it’s the CIA.
In 1966, Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist of the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), decided on a whim to plug one of his houseplants (Dracaena sp.) into a polygraph machine to see how it would react to being watered. An Archimedean moment ensued as electrical activity was recorded similar to that of a human subject experiencing an emotional event. Backster continued his experiments, testing, prodding, and even dunking his plant into hot coffee. However, his most astonishing finding came upon testing telepathy. Yes, telepathy. Backster claimed that when just thinking about burning the leaf of his plant, the distressed dracaena registered a spike in electrical activity.
These results, while seemingly absurd and obviously silly, were published in the International Journal of Parapsychology and subsequently spread worldwide thanks to a certain Peter Tompkins. Tompkins had previously written highly researched, super scientific, “just trust me on this” books such as Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1971) and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramid (1976). However, his magnum opus that would have long-lasting negative impacts on botanical research for decades to come was The Secret Life of Plants in 1973 where he built on Backster’s findings.
The book was an instant bestseller worldwide and was translated into several different languages. It was met with so much success and public acceptance that a movie was even made with a completely original soundtrack composed by none other than Stevie Wonder himself.
Pseudoscience aside, Stevie’s album is still a pleasure to listen to and remains a testament to his songwriting ability as his lyrics are just as poignant in today’s world.
A species smaller than the eye can see
Or larger than most living things
And yet we take from it without consent
Our shelter, food, habiliment..
But far too many give them in return
A stomp, cut, drown, or burn
As if they're nothing
But if you ask yourself where would you be
Without them you will find you would notBut who am I to doubt or question the inevitable being
For these are but a few discoveries
We find inside the Secret Life of Plants
On the opposite spectrum of Stevie Wonder we have Dorothy Retallack, whose The Sound of Music and Plants was also met with the New Age fanatic acceptance of the time. This doctor (‘s wife) conducted several “experiments” on plants, exposing them to the likes of Bach and Ravi Shankar, which the plants liked, along with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, which the plants did not, which they apparently expressed by ‘leaning away from the music’ and eventually dying. In an article in the New York Times, Retallack concluded that this highlighted rock music’s effects on humans, claiming “some of those plants look like the people who attend rock concerts”.
The results took off, inspiring the likes of Plant Music which you’ve already listened to, Roger Roger’s De la Musique & des Secrets pour enchanter vos Plantes (1979), and Mort Garson’s cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia (1976).
Plantasia’s moogy, synthy, ‘warm earth music for plants and the people who love them’ is absolutely delightful and was only attainable in the 70’s by first purchasing a houseplant from a store called Mother Earth in Los Angeles. Another great Sunday listen if you need one!
While The Secret Life of Plants inspired a whole genre of music for plants, visually it also affected public sentiment at the time. For the first time in human history, technology could display plant activity, through Backster’s initial polygraph, galvanometers, spectographs, and a host of other devices. As Teresa Castro explains, “plants wired to these apparatuses meticulously generate their machinic self-portrait, giving us access to their inner, secret lives.”
The film is rife with time-lapse videos of plant growth, further shedding light on the aliveness of plants, something oft-forgotten by the plant blind masses. Plants began to move out of the realm of inanimacy and into the world of the conscious.
Unfortunately, the Secret Life of Plants took exploring plant consciousness down a couple of strange, tangential rabbit holes, particularly cybernetics. The film is rife with scenes in a laboratory, with scientists in white coats gathered around plants wired up to different machines. A cybernetic art sequence by John Lifton was also included, where wired plants and performers connected to bio-telemetric systems produced output in the form of glitching, colored videos, and “plant noise” in a feedback loop.
The film attempted to explore the human-plant interface through these cybernetic experiments but unfortunately attempted to do so with methodologies that would not pass under any sort of scientific scrutiny. This was in no small part due to the anti-establishment counterculture of the time that was brought on by civil rights movements and backlash against the Vietnam War. Mistrust in ‘The Establishment’ which included scientific or academic bodies prompted an acceptance of alternative sources of knowledge. Consequently, these experiments had a rather significant effect on public perception and pop culture, but any tangible research progress was bunk. This prompted a heavy-handed response from research centers, funding institutions, and the scientific community at large; any grants or proposals that touched the concept of plant consciousness, even in roundabout manners, were quashed immediately.
For decades, actual research on plant consciousness was effectively stymied in efforts to counteract the anti-intellectual damage wrought by The Secret Life of Plants. This, of course, goes against a growing wave of modern research on that exact topic- plants hear, see, and even communicate in ways we are only beginning to understand. Zoë Schlanger’s recent book, The Light Eaters, is a delightful exploration of this emerging field of studies. Plant cybernetics, however, remains relegated to the hippie past, despite recent hubbub surrounding Neuralink’s promises. Perhaps modern research could take inspiration from plant-other interfaces that have already proven successful!
Mycorrhizal associations with plant roots are commonplace, bridging two separate kingdoms through mutualistic exchanges of carbon and energy. Lichens are another weird case- they are not particularly one thing or another, but a symbiosis of algae, cyanobacteria, fungus, and yeast, wrapped up together in a cortex. Perhaps the most wondrous of all is the marine sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, which feeds on the algae Vaucheria litorea, and takes in its chloroplasts into its own body in a process called kleptoplasty, which allows the slug to photosynthesize itself!
All my life my father expressed to me his desire to take in sunlight, bask in its rays, and utilize its energy. He and Robin Wall Kimmerer have this in common, what she terms photosynthesis envy. “The ability to take these non-living elements of the world — air and light and water — and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world” is powerful indeed. We’ve managed to harness the sun’s power for renewable energy, why not take a lesson from a sea slug and use it to make food as well? Might this be a future avenue for cybernetic research? Would you plug yourself into a plant?
While the Secret Life of Plants’ reputation is in the botanical gutter, it did stumble onto a profound concept; consciousness and perception of the world are not unique to the animal kingdom. While rather useless as a scientific reference, perhaps treated as a work of science fiction we can begin to reclaim its value. In a world facing biodiversity crisis after crisis, we must imagine a future where all beings are seen, heard, and considered.
This issue of Plant Visions was written by John Altomonte. Before you go, maybe share this newsletter with a friend, and then check us out on Instagram. We love you.
References
T. Castro, The 1970’s Plant Craze, 2020.
K. Pelletreau, A. Weber, K. Weber, M. Rumpho, Lipid Accumulation during the Establishment of Kleptoplasty in Elysia chlorotica, 2014.
R. W. Kimmerer, The Intelligence of Plants, On Being with Krista Tippett, 2016.