Botanist James Wong, obsessed with collecting indoor plants, is often asked if he plays music to his plants. Science wanted to test this idea.
According to , this notion of New Age entered popular culture in the 1960s, with psychedelic “music for plants” albumswhich once again gained popularity online. But what does the latest research show on this timeless question?
Plants don’t have ears or brains, so They can’t appreciate music like we do. However, thanks to a series of recent studies, it is now known that they not only can detect vibrations in the environmentas well as change your behavior based on the information received.
In a study in ScienceDiret, the mouse ear cress exposed to the sound of chewing caterpillars produced higher levels of bitter toxins, used as defense.
These plants even looked like able to distinguish vibrations caused by herbivores and those caused by the wind or the mating sounds of insects, even when they had similar frequencies, activating defenses only when faced with a threat.
Plants also respond to sounds of opportunity. Some flowers – such as tomatoes, blueberries and kiwi – release pollen only when vibrated by the buzzing of their specific species of pollinating bee, ignoring the sounds of other bees.
This can happen quickly: in just 3 minutes of exposure to sound from a bee in flight, the nectar from evening primrose flowers became richer in sugar.
Researchers even reported that pea plants can direct the growth of their roots to the sound of running water.
Still, there is a big difference between noise and “music”and experiments designed to test the latter’s effect on plant growth have shown more varied results.
A recent study on ResearchGate concluded that some songs were associated with a significantly better lettuce growthbut had no effect on alfalfa.
When it comes to noise, another study, at Springer Nature Link, found that sage and marigold plants exposed to 16 hours a day of continuous traffic noise presented significantly lower growth.
Could this background noise be interfering with plants’ ability to detect important sound signals? Right now, you simply don’t know.
In short, thanks to recent research, it is known that plants, far from being insensitive to sound, can be significantly affected by it.
But how there is still a lot of mysterynot enough is known to reliably predict which sounds, at what frequency, volume or duration, will produce the desired results.
Teresa Oliveira Campos, ZAP //
