Plants and vibrations

Listening to plants treats the plant as a transmitter: clip on electrodes and translate. Now flip the rig around. The plant as receiver: can a vibration act on it?

What holds up: the flower that hears the bee

In 2019, Lilach Hadany’s team in Tel Aviv published a clean result in Ecology Letters. Exposed to the recorded sound of a bee in flight, the beach evening primrose (Oenothera drummondii) raises the sugar in its nectar from 12-17% to 20% — within three minutes. Artificial frequencies outside the wingbeat band do nothing: the corolla behaves like an ear tuned to what matters to it. No mysticism involved, just a very ordinary selection pressure. Plants are sensitive to vibration: that much is settled, published, and already remarkable.

Genodics: the maximal hypothesis

Joël Sternheimer (1943-2023), a theoretical physicist who passed through Princeton and a singer under the name Évariste, proposed in the 1980s that protein synthesis emits a quantum signal. Each amino acid, by its mass, would correspond to a frequency; the whole chain to a melody — the “proteodie”. Replaying the melody would stimulate or inhibit the matching synthesis. The company Genodics applies this in agriculture, notably against esca in grapevines, and around a hundred winemakers use it.

Jean Thoby, nurseryman at the Plantarium in Gaujacq, is its most visible advocate in France: over a hundred lectures, an international plant music festival, devices that make greenery “sing”. One shortcut to avoid, though: genodics is Sternheimer’s. Thoby is its practitioner and populariser, not its author.

Where does the evidence stand? Essentially nowhere. The scientific community files proteodies under pseudoscience; a single peer-reviewed study (2020, on peas) has appeared in forty years. The botanist Catherine Lenne puts it bluntly: these melodies are supposed to govern synthesis, yet nothing has ever been tested. Winemakers’ reports exist — but esca is multifactorial, and nobody has run a blinded trial.

The cultural side

1973 was a pivotal year. Tompkins and Bird published The Secret Life of Plants, a global bestseller that plant physiology societies dismantled in symposium by 1974. The same year, Dorothy Retallack published The Sound of Music and Plants: her plants supposedly fled rock and leaned toward classical — in chambers where light, water and temperature went uncontrolled.

Then in 1976, Mort Garson recorded Mother Earth’s Plantasia on the Moog, “warm earth music for plants… and the people that love them”, given away with a plant bought at Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue. No scientific pretension whatsoever, and a record that became a cult object (reissued in 2019). It may be the most honest position of the lot: we play music to plants because it does us good.

What would be testable

Between Hadany and Sternheimer, the difference isn’t the subject — it’s the protocol. Control, blinding, measurement. One shelf, two identical batches of seedlings, a speaker on one side and silence on the other, and the same hand watering both without knowing which is which. The experiment fits on a windowsill, and it beats forty years of anecdote.