Making Ambient Music with Plants
It doesn’t get more local than this.
Meet my bandmate, Fern.
Fern attached to PlantWave on morning of Winter Solstice 2022
She’s a Western swordfern that lives under my favorite pine tree on Bainbridge Island, Washington, a rainy forested island just outside Seattle.
Where I live near forests and sea brings me deep joy and I love to share it with the world via ambient soundscapes that capture the world around me. I mainly work with field recordings of rain, sea, ferries, birds, and the like.
Recently I discovered PlantWave (I bought one, this isn’t a promo — here’s how it works) which allows me to capture the subtle electrical signals of plant life and convert those into tones and sounds; its app can do the interpretation, or you can just capture signals as MIDI to plug into your DAW or other music software or instruments. Imagine! Inviting trees or plants to play on your track. This is magic.
Snowscape, rare for Pacific Northwest, a few days before recording in this forest.
Here’s a simple example of how I used this magic recently.
During the recent winter solstice in December 2022, I connected the device to Fern for a few minutes and recorded what she had to say for a few minutes. (This week had seen a lot of freezing temperatures and snow, rare for the area — I’d planned to record a pine tree but it was very quiet, dormant. However, just under the tree canopy there were some fiesty ferns with things to say.) I listened and recorded using interpretive instruments in the PlantWave app.
That same day, I recorded the sound of the melting snow all around me, which sounded like rain. I was lucky enough to capture a big sheet of snow melting off the roof on my house and crashing onto the ground.
Combining and producing these captures resulted in my track Solstice 22 (Snow Crash), which I produced on New Year’s Day 2023 and was an instant favorite of mine and my tiny band of listeners. I love the energy of the track and knowing that it’s so organic and hyperlocal to my lived world.
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Hear Solstice 22 (Snow Crash) on Spotify or SoundCloud:
[embed]https://open.spotify.com/track/3xlbNuJ0T5zeGmFDGQ4FCx?si=1ae3bd1848674602[/embed]