Plant songs

[occidentalis]

Sorry people, I have been asked to remove this post as I did not have proper permission to post these files.

If you have downloaded them already, please do not pass them on to anyone else.

thanks

Edited June 15, 2010 by occidentalis

[Amazonian]

wow

[niggles]

I cant wait to get home from office restricted net access and have a look at this! Thanks for sharing something Id never have thought of doing myself...

[hebrew]

awesome i have had a deep interest in bio-music for a long time, thanks for this, i am really interested in working around with these

thank you

how do you get hold of one of these machines?

[mutant]

This is very interesting indeed, caapi is more musical and interesting I think. Thanks a lot.

I would love to listen to some details of the proceedure, so as to understand some things, I understand electricity and audio frequencies quite well

1) do you have any photos of the connections you made to roots and leaves?

2) I would love to know approximation methods : what was the protocol that turnt the signals into frequencies/midi notes , I mean how accurate and according this was. DO you got any alternative recordings deriving from the same signal sequence using another protocol, so as to see differences?

Thanks for sharing, I will be definately making something with these!

[paradox]

does the frequency of the current picked up from the EC meter determine the midi note? ie does the frequency of the EC blips from the plant correspond (somehow in the circuitry of the machine) to sound frequences? & therefore does the frequency of the currents generated by the plant actually determine the midi number played (which determines which notes are played in the melodies)?

or have you used those EC blips from the plant simply to create sequences in time of on & off which you have then used to trigger the notes of your choice (creating the melodies you shared) in the midi instrument of your choice?

or what?

interesting stuff either way, sounds like some fascinating experimentation

[occidentalis]

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Edited June 15, 2010 by occidentalis

[occidentalis]

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Edited June 15, 2010 by occidentalis

[vual]

Whats this machine called?

This is totally amazing i wish your friend all the luck, this is totally amazing....

[hebrew]

I would really like to know exactly which ranges of EC levels are converted to which notes and on what basis that was decided by the designers of the machine

this is important, i would think that the plants musical range would be outside equal temperament, and possibly be more akin to just intonation.

somehow the conversion to midi would tune the true sounds into equal temperament. which really isnt that useful in hearing the true sound of the plant, but that doesnt mean it isnt useful information, it makes me think of olivier messiaen and how he transcribed bird song, but birds dont sing in equal temperament, he needed to tune to that tuning system. but his bird music is so beautiful and amazing and is a huge influence upon 20th century music.

i would like to hear the sounds amplified somehow from the EC thing as audio, that would be interesting.

Pauline Oliveros was a composer who worked in this feild of music composition, she's very interesting IMO

here is some info about Biomusic, the new age side to the term is crap but i think the brain waves stuff is intriguing

wikipedia

[hebrew]

what i find interesting is the plant seems monophonic, when listening to it, i feel like we are listening to something private,

we are monophonic instruments, it seems by hearing this music that plants are too.

im going to learn to play the caapi one on the piano. if i can find time i would like to apply some composition techniques to the motifs and use it as source data for some piano minatures. the music has definite motifs that recur throughout the piece and it is in some kind of mode. will look at the score later. one obvious one is the rising and falling motif. but with pitch as well that falling motif seems to stick around the same notes. its was really cool to listen to, sounded like something could of been written by some mid to late 20th century composer.

[paradox]

The mathematics of how the EC frequencies are converted to musical frequencies is the question here.

 

well first of all MIDI isn't audio. midi is just a signal which basically can be on or off, so the midi is just a signal which is then processed by a piece of software (or hardware) which uses those on off signals to trigger the playing of an audio signal from that software, hardware etc

midi has a number system of 1 through to 128.. each number realates to a key(note) on a midi keyboard with each representing a specific sound frequency ie the specific frequencies of the chromatic scale over 16 octaves..

occidentalis you must of used a plugin or similar in ableton to synthesize those piano notes. using the midi signal & the frequency profile of the plant EC to trigger the specific midi notes that relate to each frequency. either that or the machine thingy has a small piano synth or something in it's hardware which is translating the midi signals into audio & various levels of pitch onborad & you're just feeding that audio straight through ableton..

?

[hebrew]

looking at the score i am mistaken, polyphonic music, not monophonic should lay off the

[t st tantra]

interesting the suggestion that a plant can turn it on or off as it wants [to play or not].

t s t .

hope this doesnt lead to scientology for plants,lol.

Edited June 11, 2010 by t st tantra

[drugo]

The various distributions of melody across different phrases (or stanzas) seems to indicate grammar and refined syntax.

The name of this mysterious machine would be great?

[paradox]

hmmm have you tried hooking the machine up to yourself & comparing it with the plants? or you could try hooking it up to yourself when under the influence of various plants & see how it correlates to the plant blips..?

this is very interesting if the actual electrical frequency the plant emits, determines the pitch of the notes we hear.. because it really sounds like often it is following fairly precise intervals... & yeah it does seem to follow a sine wave pattern of rising & descending freuency/pitch, which makes sense really.. ah hang on maybe thats it... perhaps the relative strength in current of each blip determines which midi note is played in a ratio of 128?

[ThunderIdeal]

im going to learn to play the caapi one on the piano. if i can find time i would like to apply some composition techniques to the motifs and use it as source data for some piano minatures. the music has definite motifs that recur throughout the piece and it is in some kind of mode. will look at the score later. one obvious one is the rising and falling motif. but with pitch as well that falling motif seems to stick around the same notes.

 

yep, at times it seems to always end with the same tone.

[mutant]

Ok this is all very interesting, cool notes on the cappi one , Velvet.

There are not so many infos, so I might easily be wrong on what I will say, but I will share my thoughts.

Well, it would be lots more easy for me to say it in greek, but anyways.

We must examine this like an electrical circuit.

So, what so do we measure with a EC meter?

that would be Electrical Conductivity , through resistance

If this is the real thing and not some false signals from the apparatus itself,

I would expect that the plant's conductivity is varied, it changes in time, so this is a thing that it either automatically does, like it is a mode, like velvet said, or it is trying to talk to us or is feeling something or whatever.

So the next segment of the experiment / analysis is trying to find a pattern in that variation of EC. See if we can observe something interesting! We could see this in a value-time graphic chart

So the transforming of this variation of EC to some electrical signal is the first BOX we have to know what's inside.

I would guess this must be made through using the plants stem as a resistance by that apparatus. I would further guess that that machine is applicating some kind of current/voltage to the plant. What kind? is the resulting signal we measure dependent on some parameters/knobs on the machine ?

Ok, lets have this in mind, and try to see the next step.

So we measure, lets say the voltage in our resistance [read: the plant] .

As far ass EC continues to be varied we measure a varied current. The apparatus might both running some current through the plant and measure the resistance of plant, probably it measures the resistance by just doing this.

so the next box we should place is a special MIDI interface that takes the varied current values and assign them to MIDI values. This has a protocol. What's the resulting signals and what's the approximations of the protocol?

If this is a black box that readily sends midi signals in it's output, it must be an apparatus that's doing exactly this job. You just connect the midi output to some sequencer and listen to it musically.

I will study more the matter and will do a follow up probably. I also got a great book on psychoacoustics, haven't read it yet though. I think it's time I checked it out

Great thread, learn the machines data ;)

[occidentalis]

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Edited June 15, 2010 by occidentalis

[occidentalis]

VelvetSiren - if you look at the score it is obvious that the notes are layed out in a scale - can you tell us the name of the scale?

[hebrew]

yes i can work out the mode, but the midi file is a mess when it comes to a score, it needs to be arranged into correct music writing, at the moment its all over the place when it comes as the midi file but i will open it up and see if i can see the main mode it is in

[hebrew]

had a quick look at the score, when you open the midi file in sibelius, it opens on one stave and has some crazy tied notes going on all over the place, to make this into something useful it would need to be edited to read properly, its like trying to read writing that has spelling mistakes in every word

but having said that, there are a lot of 7th intervals, as well as appearing to be in A major, but i would have to fix up the notes to give a proper analysis, seems that all F C and G's are sharps, telling me it is A major, F# minor, but there are no raised sevenths and the bass notes that occurs at the parts i looked at were A one octave below middle C. so my guess it played around that scale, maybe changing base notes to get various modes, but a proper workup of this piece will have to wait a few weeks

[occidentalis]

The start of the file may be a little dodgy because I think we accidentally went back and re-recorded over it when the recording looped around.

Maybe start looking at it a few bars in. From my limited perspective (almost zero musical theory knowledge), and just looking at the positions of the midi notes in Reason it looks pretty clear after bar 20 or so...:

[ThunderIdeal]

what notes are they?

kinda really lame if the data is converted into tones of a particular scale, it would be more interesting if it were 12 tone.

the word has been evading me for days, what is that word for all of this? the point is that you can convert any data you want into midi, using any formula that you pull out of your ass.

[ThunderIdeal]

can you squish it all horizontally? that way you will quickly spot any anomalies. at first i thought there was neither d or d sharp but there is a d hidden in there.