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The Harmonic Life of Plants
What Mother Never Told You About
The Wild Side of Science
Botanist George Smith, who learned of this work in 1960, demonstrated that greenhouse seeds sprouted earlier, thicker, tougher, and greener when Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" was played to them 24 hours per day. A Canadian engineer, Eugene Canby, produced 66% yield increases in wheat, no matter the soil fertility, by piping them the music of Bach.
Dorothy Retallack, a professional organist, ran experiments in the early 1970's which showed that flowering annuals favored jazz (Ellington and Armstrong) or classical music (Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven) over rock music which eventually stunted or killed them. She measured the general health, growth, and the positive or negative stem slant to/from loud speakers.
Backster's polygraph experiments, mentioned in Plant Psychology, dealt with the concept of "primary perception". His plants were able to perceive the sacrificing of other plant and animal life. I decided that perhaps musical irradiation could also be influenced by the plants sense of "perception". Thus, my experiments deal with the impact of both the musical notes and the perceived intent of the words.
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The liner notes for a 1975 L.P. album, Plant
Music, produced by Shannon, Boyles, and Di Maria, noted that as recently as 1906
that plants were considered "nearly" deaf. They noted, as did
authors Tompkins and Bird, the impact of experiments by Singh
and Backster in the 1960's which countered this theory. T. C. Singh,
a botany professor in India, proved "that harmonic sound waves
affect the growth of flowers, fruits, and seed-yield of plants." He
demonstrated that "fundamental metabolic processes are accelerated
by musical sounds or rhythmic beat" by having flute and stringed instruments played to them 25 minutes per day. He even discovered that dancing, without the music, accelerated flowering as the rhythms of the footwork transmitted into the soil.
My experiments were done under identical conditions of light, temperature, and humidity. I used a
single clump of one cultivar (NAGASAKI, which gave its life to the experiment) and subjected it to music
of equal time duration and dB level in order to detect the direction and degree of scape slant. Shown to
the right is the plant in its neutral state in which no music is being played.
The Effects of Music, page 2