In my work as a director, author and theatre musician, over the last twenty years I have moved much closer to the “ancestral” forms of theatre, where the sacred meets art and where the function of art (stage art in my case) is not so much entertainment as care, the link between the opposing forces that underlie our reality (visible/invisible, correct/incorrect, beautiful/ugly, living/dead, and so on), the raising of questions, catharsis.

In my case, this took the form of twenty years of research in the world of Noh theatre, a theatrical form born in fourteenth century medieval Japan, which has had the good fortune of changing very little over time. One of the theatrical forms where the dimension of care, of a bridge between the living and the dead, of a hand held out between the visible and the invisible, is to my mind the most tangible.

Having written a contemporary Noh play about the Fukushima disaster, a prayer addressed to the dead and to the living, written in “collaboration” with them (where the actor, the reader, is no more than a channel that lets the dead come and voice their pain before the audience of the living), I was looking for a musical interaction in order to create a recorded sound version.

But I did not want to risk falling into music, the way vocally we risk falling into theatre, and coming across this device that lets plants translate the movement of their sap into sounds and create a “music” of plants won me over to the point that I bought, this summer, a U1 device made by Devodama (Music of the plants).

Back in Paris, I connected the device to one particular plant. Let me explain. The evening I had decided to buy the device, as I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I felt shivers all over, continuously and insistently. That is, for me, the sign that something which cannot speak with words is addressing me. There are two plants in that bathroom. Reaching my hand out towards both, I very clearly felt that it came from the Kentia. So I took that information, or that feeling, as a request to be the plant of the experiment, a ten-year-old Kentia, from the palm family.

This Kentia has always lived in the bathroom. It was rescued ten years ago by my wife, who found it abandoned and dying. I mention this because in the experiment it matters, it seems to me.

Finally, to define its environment, you need to know that this Kentia has always heard music.

Here we play guitar, piano, drums, trumpet, flutes of every kind, percussion too. And we have all these instruments at home. On top of that, it is not unusual for us to get together with friends to play. Finally, there are 6 of us. 4 children (14, 13, 10, 2 years old) and 2 adults. There is also 1 dog and 1 cat.

A blended family made by two adults who already have a solid practice as researchers in “living well”, with a daily meditation practice and a view of the living world that is as respectful as possible, so it is very rare for us to be weighed down by anger, hatred or any kind of negativity. We are vegetarians, but with this encounter with the plants, even that may well become complicated

The first thing to say before recounting the various experiments with the Kentia is that, on the way back from Italy (Damanhur), I stopped for about ten days at my mother’s. I took the opportunity to try the machine on one of her plants. I chose an orchid. My mother also plays the piano and her surroundings are often filled with classical music in the background. Her orchid was fairly talkative in sound, but took long breaks. It played for an hour or two, then stopped. We would then moisten the electrode on the leaf again and that let it make sound for a while longer. But it never played more than two or three hours at a stretch. I say this because the Kentia, in the three weeks it has been plugged in, has only stopped for a few hours. In all, something like three times four hours (for the last few days I have decided to note down every stop and how long it lasts, because it seems to me that they mean something, though perhaps not something to do with the immediate surroundings).

Since what I need is a real “artistic” collaboration, a constructed one, and since, as I let her play all the time, the idea is that her modulation should be pleasant to the ear (ours is used to it by now, but when friends come round they often complain about the sound… IMPORTANT: she is in mode 12 and not on the A major scale), I set out to try to teach her our music.

I go about this in several ways…

While most of the time I let her modulate in peace, at night, when we go to bed, I systematically put on drum or bass loops using Logic Pro. I mainly use simple beats and traditional rhythms. Same for the basses (I put on either a rhythm or a bass), which I try to keep quite simple, on a few notes at most.

It is worth noting that quite quickly she really did make distinctions between the rhythms, and she interacts fairly harmoniously with the tempo.

I have created several banks of vocal sounds that I use by loading them into synthesizers. That is, I assign the keys of the MIDI keyboard to sounds I have recorded myself. This is done with samplers. In my case it is the EXS 24, found in MainStage and Logic, which is very easy to get into.

All you then have to do is connect the U1 device to the computer through its MIDI output. The computer then takes the MIDI information it receives from the device and passes it into the EXS (the sampler).

One of the keyboards I created lets me hear the name and the pitch of the notes the plant plays. In my case (I do not have perfect pitch), it lets us both be sure we are on the same note. To begin with, my aim was to get her to understand that our scales are made of certain tones and semitones. For her, it seems difficult to land precisely on a note without catching the sharps around it, and when she does manage it, she makes the following mistake: say we work on the scale of C, which gives C, D, E, F, G, A, B, that comes to 1/2 tone, 1 tone, 1 tone, 1/2 tone, 1 tone, 1 tone, 1 tone. For her, reproducing that particular sequence seems very complicated. When she starts to modulate correctly, she will play C, D, E, F#, G#, A#, that is, put a whole tone between the notes, systematically. Or, the other way round, if she starts on B and manages the step to C, she will then play every semitone.

But it is obvious that she is trying, that she hears what I am asking, that she attempts to answer it, even though it seems to put her under a certain stress. In those phases it often happens that she never stops and that she modulates quite fast. On the other hand, she does not go up into the high octaves, nor does she cut out, as Jean Thoby (the botanist and “musiniériste” who is the forerunner of the music of the plants in France) has observed on plants that express some form of stress or discomfort.

As the exercise is repeated, she has become less agitated (very fast modulation, without a single silence), to the point that she can stay silent while I play and sing the phrase to her, but I notice no significant progress in her dexterity at giving the sounds I ask for.

This is the part I am particularly fond of, and so is she, it seems…

They are question-questions thrown out from both sides.

At first she did not respond at all. As if she could not hear me. With the orchid, at my mother’s, the exchanges were possible and audible straight away. Here, for the first 24 hours, she modulated without stopping and without taking any account (audible account at least) of our presence, of our attempts to interact.

Depending on the instrument I pick up, she moves into different modulations. If I am on the Shakuhachi (traditional Japanese bamboo flute) she will make long tones and a lot of silences.

If I am at the piano, she will make shorter tones. And that showed up as early as the third day! And the more time passes, the more she falls in with the mood of the pieces. She will play crisp and short and in the high octaves on things that move, and rather long and in the low octaves on calmer, more solemn things. Even if, at the level of the notes she plays, I see no understanding or application of our musical codes… To put it more simply: it is often dissonant, though in the right “mood”.

The first thing I did, having heard from the people at Damanhur that putting a plant which knows the equipment together with one that has never experienced it lets the second benefit from the knowledge of the first, was to put her in contact with that kind of plant as best I could. Having no plants used to the U1, and being worried by the lack of interaction, I sat her in front of videos of plants using the device. And I showed her photographs of Damanhur, of the plants, of the trees there. I do not know whether that is what allowed the connection, but I am left with the feeling that it was from that moment on that we interacted more directly.

I have also noticed over the last few days that when I put on a video where you see people playing their music, she is more in “phase” with them and her contribution is more accurate and more recognisable than when we play her recorded music with no image. At first I would sit her facing the screen, but I have a feeling that is not necessary. I would need to push the experiments further on this, which I will not fail to do…

For a few days now we have been playing her recorded music. Tango and Celtic in particular. Tango, because when we play her tango bass loops she is very much at ease and makes phrases that really do sound tango. And Celtic, because in the course of my research I realised, watching a video of traditional Celtic music, that she was very receptive to it.

We are only at the beginning of this experiment and I will report back when we have moved a little further, if the results are significant.

Here we come to the most striking experiment.

As it happens, wanting to see whether she could really learn, I told myself that using spoken language, which we are all more comfortable with (except those with perfect pitch, obviously), would let me understand better how she works and, I must admit, remove my doubt that all this might just be random. Using the same set-up as for the sung keyboard (MIDI interface between the U1 and the computer, sound software: MainStage with the EXS24 sampler), I recorded the names of the various members of the family, along with “yes”, “no” and “thank you”.

I assigned these sounds to different notes. To begin with:

“Thank you” at G#1 (the lowest MIDI message the device can send), “yes” at A1, “no” at A#1, “Alexandre” at C2, “Galiléo” (the youngest son… 2 years old) at C#2, “Claire” (my partner) at C4, “Hélia” (the 10-year-old girl) at C5, “Lina” (the older girl, 13, who is particularly musical) at C#5.

What is interesting is, first of all, that she quickly changed her mode of “communication”. Before this keyboard existed, she would greet us, when we came up to her or stroked her, with a glissando running from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, whereas since she has had this keyboard with the words, she only uses “yes”, or, if we touch her, kiss her, stroke her, she uses “yes” followed by “thank you”.

Completely surprisingly, whereas learning the notes (in interaction with me), learning music, seems very slow and laborious, here, in only one or two hours, she had complete command of her word keyboard. She does sometimes trigger the names without meaning to (or so it seems to me) while she is playing. But in that case she says all the words one after another. Whereas when she calls, she is able to use a single word, or to put words side by side without a mistake, even though the words sit in very different and distant places on the keyboard.

Example: “claire”, “claire”, “claire”, then Claire comes and stands in front of her: “yes”, “thank you”. So C4, C4, C4, A1, G#1 (all the more so as the name “Claire” is now at C6!) Without touching any other word on the way!? Needless to say, when we discovered this, we were impressed.

To make sure that none of this was down to chance, we moved the name “Claire”, because in those first days it was mainly Claire she called. So I moved it to C6, two octaves higher, and brought “Hélia” closer, to D6, and “Lina” to D#6. Of course, I started talking to her and telling her that I had moved her favourite name. I should recall here that Claire rescued her ten years ago and that she is the one in the house who looks after the plants, with infinite love and patience.

Her love of plants is such that our house feels like a botanist’s home.

When Claire came up to her, after the name “Claire” had been moved on the keyboard, the Kentia went into a moment of “panic”.

After passing through C4, she (the Kentia) sent out fast sounds, running from low to high, from high to low. And this time it took her longer than the first time to find the magic name again. Forty five minutes later, I was telling myself that I was going to put Claire back at C4, because, believe it or not, I felt uncomfortable sensing her “panic” just to answer our disbelief. And then, a miracle, in twenty minutes she found the name “Claire” again, calmed down, and the same thing described above happened again and has kept happening for more than ten days.

Another interesting story, little Galiléo, with all the excitement around this plant, has grown closer to her and often gives her a stroke or a kiss. He gets his “yes”, “thank you” too. Here he comes with a glass of water (we drink re-energised water) and pours it for her, and she answers him: “Galiléo”, “thank you”.

You could say it is chance. Let me point out that “Alexandre” is a semitone away and that when we work on the scales, she has a devil of a job not to spill over onto the surrounding semitones. The “no” is a semitone from the “yes”, which is itself a semitone from the “thank you”. Needless to say, if this were random, there would not be much chance of that kind of word pairing being possible.

This pairing with the words made me realise that the plant knows when one of the family is about to come home. It happened to me today in a blatant way. Because, while in the first few days she called a lot and played a lot with the words, for some days now she can go hours without triggering a single word (several keyboards are stacked. So she can play the piano, plus other MIDI instruments, while still having access to her word keyboard). So, after a long stretch (two hours, I would say) without a word, there she is saying “Claire”, “Claire”. I say to myself, “odd, Claire is out, she is not due back for a good while”, and thirty seconds later I hear the door downstairs. It was her. She had sorted out everything she had to do in far less time than she had originally planned. And now it has just happened again. She was downstairs, putting Galiléo to bed, and the plant said “Claire”, “Claire”, “Claire”, three times. And this very moment she comes out of Galiléo’s room and comes back up. From Galiléo’s room she cannot hear the plant, and in the living room where we are, we cannot hear what is going on in the man cub’s room.

One last story, if I may. She warned me, “Galiléo”, “Galiléo”, “Galiléo”. I got up from my desk where I was working. Galiléo was with his mother in the bathroom. Or so I thought… Because, walking into the bathroom, I found the man cub on his own, emptying a whole bottle of shampoo into the bath. Nothing serious, but it did let us limit the damage.

It is a little early to give this short account, as the device has only been in the house for three weeks. But if it can help find ways of getting research started, then it matters that researchers should know about these miracles we live every day and should step into this barely explored world which is nonetheless at the root of everything. At a time when taking the living world of this earth into account is calling us to order, the opportunities offered by this U1 module and the field of research it opens are of the utmost interest.

Today I do not need to explain to my youngest son, who is two, that it matters to respect nature… Because he has had direct experience of an intelligent contact with it. I can assure you that living through this changes forever the relationship you have with the living world. How do you cut down a tree once you have lived that, or even pull a leaf off a plant or a flower?

We will learn, I hope, what our ancestors have been telling us down the ages, that we must work together, in collaboration. And that only in this way will we have the honour of continuing to take part in preserving this magnificent ecosystem that is our earth.

For my part, let me repeat here that my experiment is first and foremost a musical one. Even if, as things stand, I have doubts about this Kentia’s ability to learn our normative music. Perhaps, as with us, every individual is singular. This one will be more about verbal exchange, that one more about the musical… Perhaps, as this understanding and its devices develop, we will one day see plants that are engineers, and others that are schoolteachers…

I look forward to reading about the wonderful discoveries you will make, and you can be sure I will keep you informed of ours!

Kind regards,

Alexandre FERRAN

• For those who do not know:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G are the names of the notes in the universal language: A corresponds to la, B to si, C to do, and so on.

As for the numbers that follow them, they are the octave numbers. An 88-key piano starts at A-1 (a very low La) and ends at C7 (a very, very high Do). The middle C of the piano is called C3 (do médium).

The U1 device is sold as a 4-octave instrument. Yet with the Kentia we are on five and a half octaves (G#1/E6).