SHAURYA SINGH THAPA
All You Need To Know About
‘ Music For Plants ’
A
Barcelona opera house by the name of Gran Teatre del Liceu opened its doors in June , 2020 , after a three-month long lockdown . The venue ’ s first concert post-lockdown turned out to be an exclusive performance for an audience of plants ! The UceLi Quartret played for over 2,292 plants that occupied each seat of the theatre .
The concert was symbolic as the plants were later distributed to healthcare workers . But the question remains , can plants actually hear music ?
When new-age thinking was reaching its peak in the 1970s , a book called The Secret Life of Plants supported the claim that playing music to plants can help in plant growth . Even before the book ’ s publication , an experiment by an Indian scientist in 1962 seemed to revolve around similar assumptions .
Playing Western classical music , Dr . T . C . Singh from Annamalai University , Tamil Nadu , discovered that the balsam plants grew an extra 20 % in height and 72 % in biomass .
Similar observations were made when Indian classical ragas were played . He later experimented with other crops , and found that they grew 25 % to 60 % larger under the influence of the latter .
But how can plants respond to music ( or any sound ) when they possess no hearing organs ? And yet a few experiments seem to conclude that plants do bear some response to sounds .
For instance , in 1973 , a music student from Colorado Women ’ s College , Dorothy Retallack , placed three groups of plants in separate environments . A single musical note of F was played for eight hours for the first group , three hours
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