The Scenius Invention

If you search for "plant music" today, you will likely see my face. I am the one doing the podcasts, doing the interviews for Wired and NPR, and making the viral videos on TikTok. To the world, I am the inventor of this technology. And in a specific sense—regarding the unique, patented generative process that turns bio-data into a real-time music—that is true.

But looking back at the history of Data Garden and PlantWave, I am acutely aware that my invention grew out of a "scenius."

Brian Eno challenges the "Great Man" theory of history—the idea that innovation comes from a lone genius working in isolation. Instead, he argues for scenius: the communal form of genius. While I am the one out front carrying the flag, the spark didn't happen in a vacuum.

The Philadelphia Soil

It started in a specific time and place: Philadelphia, circa 2010. There was a unique energy there—a community of friends who were incredibly talented and just wanted to make things together.

I think about Zeke Tempin, who drove 400 miles to my record release show and immediately offered to build our website. I think about Ian Cross connecting us to Bartram’s Garden. I think about the 800 people who showed up to a botanical garden in Southwest Philly just to see what would happen if we ran electricity through the trees and let experimental artists run wild.

That environment was the fertile soil that allowed a crazy idea like "plant music" to take root.

The Collective Breakthrough

The breakthrough of the Data Garden Quartet was a collective phenomenon.

  • It required Alex Tyson, a true intuitive genius who first asked, "Why don't we have the plants play as a quartet?".

  • It required Sam Cusumano, who had the technical wizardry to take a Radio Shack lie detector and turn it into a MIDI controller.

  • It required Jon Shapiro, who years later pushed me to see the movement this work was generating.

  • It even required Manuel, a guy in Germany who violated our trademarks, only to become our electrical engineer for hardware.

Without any one of these people, PlantWave would not exist.

Choosing the Channel

So, why am I the one still doing this?

Alex is a filmmaker at heart and moved on to pursue that passion. Sam had a successful career in IT and treated this as a fascinating hobby. For them, the project was a beautiful exploration, but it wasn't their life's singular calling.

For me, it was different. Once I heard that first generative stream in the studio, I realized we weren't just translating data; we were extending real-time human perception into subtle realms of reality. It felt like a direct connection to the “implicate order”—that deep, invisible field of existence that connects all living things, where our physical reality is just a ripple on a much deeper pond. I saw that technology could be used not to distract us, but to re-activate innate sensory capacities we had long abandoned. I was locked in. I found the area of work I was passionate about, and I couldn't look away. 

I believe that when a breakthrough is ready to happen, the universe looks for a channel. The 'scenius' generates the spark, but the fire needs someone to tend it. My purpose isn't just to carry a specific technology forward. I am here to bring the sonification discoveries I made with plants to the rest of the world, and eventually, to apply them to other sensory inputs. Eventually, we’ll build tools that help us connect more deeply to ourselves and activate untapped capacities that lie dormant within us all.

My unique contribution was figuring out how to listen. I focused on the DSP—how to map that raw, chaotic data into something musical and emotional. But I could only do that because of the foundation built by my friends.

Today, there are over 25,000 people listening to plants with PlantWave. This is a testament to the power of collaboration, the magic of a scene, and the undeniable fact that nature has been waiting to speak to us all along. We just needed to build the right team to hear it. 

I trust that, through this work, new scenes are forming and new scenius will emerge. 

With that, I look forward to seeing where this all takes us, together.