Maximum Yield Australia/New Zealand March/April 2020 | Page 16

It’s amazing to know
that each plant can
have its own song.”
from the
EDITOR
TG Toby Gorman
14
Maximum Yield
I
t is well known that people like to play
music for their plants to help them grow, and,
anthropomorphically, keep them entertained.
In these very pages (“The Science of
Serenading Your Plants,” Maximum
Yield April 2018), we covered how science
determined that certain plants prefer certain
music to inspire their growth.
But what if plants could play a major role
in composing their own music? Recently,
artist and photographer Laara Cerman
and geneticist Scott Pownall teamed up to
translate the DNA from creeping buttercup
and brown knapweed into music.
A DNA sequence is a long, continuous chain
made up of four nucleotides known as A, G,
C, and T. Each letter represented a musical
chord, of which four notes were assigned.
The nucleotide that was sequenced determined
which note was played and for how long.
The result? By playing notes based on the
DNA sequence, with a little help from humans,
each plant was able to play its own song.
It’s a form of sonification, the auditory
equivalent of data visualisation. In this
instance, the data from DNA is used to
make music, but sonification can have other
applications such as identifying mutations,
or at least complement visual inspection to
identify mutations.
Who knows what applications it might
have in the future, but for now, it’s amazing
to know that each plant can have its own
song, and some day, with a little help from
technology, your plants will be able to play
you a song composed by them.