The Story of Plant Music

From a Philadelphia Art Scene to a New Way of Listening to Life

How do we listen in a world full of noise? What if the quietest beings can help show us how to listen more deeply?

This is the origin story of plant music. This is not about a gadget, but a practice of listening. It's a story that began with a refusal to make plastic waste and unfolded through a series of accidents, intuitions, and technical breakthroughs that revealed a new form of collaboration and artistic expression.

This is not a tale of a lone inventor. It is a story of scenius— a word coined by Brian Eno to describe the genius of a scene. It emerged from a specific time and place in Philadelphia, through the minds and hands of collaborators like Alex Tyson and Sam Cusumano. My role was to listen and build the bridge between their ideas. What was discovered in the process led to an instrument that would change how people view our relationship with nature around the world.

From the rejection of plastic waste to the invention of new instruments, and from the brink of bankruptcy to a global community of tens of thousands of listeners and creators, this is the definitive account of how we learned to give nature a voice.

This is that story, in eight acts.

Act I: A Seed of an Idea It started with a refusal to make plastic trash. Discover how a desire for a zero-waste record label led to Data Garden: a project where digital albums were sold on handmade paper embedded with seeds, allowing music to literally grow into flowers.

Act II: The Question - Can Plants Play Music? An invitation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art sparks a strange and ambitious question from co-founder Alex Tyson: What happens if we stop playing the instruments and ask the plants to be the band members?

Act III: The Pivot: Listening to the Data The technical breakthrough in the studio. I explain the moment I stopped trying to make plants trigger our loops and built a generative system to listen to theirs. This is the birth of the "reverb spike" moment that proved we weren't just observing data—we were collaborating with life itself.

Act IV: The First Interaction A chaotic museum installation, a child’s intuitive discovery that she could "think light" into the sensors, and the realization that plants are reacting to the energy we carry inside us. This is where the science met the "implicate order".

Act V: Sharing the Technology How the demand from artists turned a museum installation into a cardboard-encased product. This Act covers the birth of MIDI Sprout, the struggle of hardware, and the accidental creation of a new instrument class.

Act VI: Toward Accessibility – PlantWave (2019- Present) The struggle of the pandemic, manufacturing devices in a driveway in the San Fernando Valley, and the radical vulnerability required to save the company from collapse when the supply chain—and the hardware—broke.

Act VII: The Unfolding Present – PlantWave as a Platform The development of the PlantWave sound engine that turns raw data into a symphony. This is the vision for the future—using biosonification not just for plants, but to extend human perception into subtle realms of reality.

Act VIII: The Scenius Invention A reflection on collaboration, the fertile soil of Philadelphia, and the idea that breakthrough is a collective phenomenon that sometimes chooses a specific channel to bring it to the world.