Artist Creates Music From Plants, Fruits, Flowers and Even Mushrooms — Turns Out, They Can 'Sing'

Everything has music if you are attentive enough to listen to it. Here we’re talking about plants. Mint plant chimes. The music of Devil’s club is like frogs dipping in and out of a crystalline, starry water pond. Cherry trees are conducting their independent concert while a cluster of leaves is sitting in a studio recording their solo album. On another day, a grove of banyan trees exploded into a mellifluous, Zen-like melody, jolting the audience in a meditative trance.  

Somewhere in Los Angeles and Switzerland, desserts and dishes laid out on a dinner table started playing ambient tunes. The diners listened to their food as they ate. All thanks to Tarun Nayar, the creator behind Modern Biology (@modernbiology).

You can’t possibly listen to a cardamom seed or a red rose if you just bring it close to your ears. Just as a string-slinging guitarist can’t play music without his guitar, you cannot listen to the music of plants without an appropriate instrument. In this case, Nayar designed this cosmic instrument that buttresses his passion to explore the mysterious relationship between nature and sound. With his experience as a musician and former biologist, Nayar has developed a set of instruments that enables him to listen to plants, flowers, trees, and forests, even conduct concerts and arrange background dinner soundscapes with their music.

For the past four decades, Nayar has been travelling across the globe, playing electronic music. However, his music sessions are exceptionally unusual. Unlike a jangle of musical instruments, he uses his specially curated set of electronic devices. With headphones strapped around his ears, he treads through forests, jungles, beaches, and lagoons to comb the territory for plants or trees. Once he finds a plant he desires to listen to, he squats down, pulls out his gadgets, and gets to work.

Nayar lumbers over the sloping mountains, tumbling with his tangles of wires and plugs. With the finesse of a sound artist, he curls and twists these wires around tree barks, often wrapping and coiling them around flower clusters, bushes, or squishy little mushrooms. Once the setup is finished, he inserts a plug into the plant. While the bioelectric energy of the plant seeps and flows through the wires, the bioelectric sensors attached to the circuit board receive a signal, which makes the synthesizer buzz with blinking lights. That’s when he listens. There are tunes to be listened to, rhythms to be explored.

Scroll down his social media galleries and you’ll find Nayar surrounded by cables and synths, chucking a pinny plug into a watermelon or a mango tree, pressing the wire ends onto stalks of grass and flowering beds, listening and knowing what electricity sounds like. For him, every plant is pulsing with electrical energy, and he can’t possibly miss meditating on their music. This immense passion stems from his training in Indian classical music, he told HomeGrown.

"Growing up playing Indian classical music has really influenced the way I approach music. […] So it was very special to work with the native plants of [India]! Cardamom, mangroves, even the majestic banyan trees. Every being is energetic, and, for me, this practice allows me to connect with nature and our non-human communities in a profound way," Nayar said. In the coming years, he plans to explore the music of aquatic plants, before which he needs to secure waterproof gear. Because everything has a melody, whether seaweed or a purple iris. This melody pulsates with electricity. An electricity called life.

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