DESCRIPTION:
This is a live musical improvisation.
The plant is connected to the U1 and I am playing my Anantar (koto-kampura).

The U1 device allows plants to produce sounds and to make music. It does so by measuring the electrical resistance of vegetable tissues and transducing it into a MIDI signal (Musical Instruments Digital Interface). The MIDI signal then controls a synthesizer that produces the actual sound.

At first, it might be difficult to assimilate the idea that in the end, the music produced by the plant is not only an automatic outcome of this electrical connection, rather a sort of "awareness" of the plant was also involved.
This is what the researchers in Damanhur (the developers of the U1 device) have found out in their forty years research. They say that after some time of being exposed to their own sounds, plants seem to become aware that the sound is coming from them and they start modulating it intentionally.
I witnessed this myself years ago while rehearsing for a live performance. I found myself spending hours playing piano together with a plant and I was witnessing the slow development of the process. The subtle changes in the plant's music in response to the sound of the piano and its own sound was becoming more and more evident to me.

The classic book 'The secret life of plants' is a good read. It can be a good starting point to gain information on unusual and fascinating experiments and research on the consciousness of plants.
In a time frame that spans from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, there was a booming interest in the understanding of plant consciousness.
Unfortunately, our scientific investigation modality shows all its primitiveness when the only thing people can come up with is to threaten or hurt living beings to observe their reactions.

In the 1960s a man named Cleve Backster observed the astounding reactions of different plants when subdued to threatening intentions and behaviours. The plants would 'pass out', showing no sign of the electric activity that was being detected by instruments made of a galvanometer used in conjunction with a Wheatstone bridge and very similar to the polygraph used in lie detection.
Using this system Backster was able to observe behaviour in plants such as detecting the intentions of people in the room, reacting to threatening intentions or behaviour and even reacting with shock when another life form was hurt in the vicinity.
From the mid-1950s Marcel Vogel experimented more in the direction of psychic energy. He was able to observe how plants react to the projection of negative and positive thoughts towards them.
A man named Pierre Paul Sauvin conducted an even more peculiar experiment. He used a toy train to create a mechanism that would give him a considerable electric shock at the end of the train's course. He then connected a plant to a with by which the train direction could be reversed. After receiving the first shock, Sauvin ran the train again, this time anticipating the pain of the electric shock. He reported that the plant was able to detect his anxiety and reacted by switching the direction of the train.
In Japan, Dr. Ken Hashimoto, an expert in lie detection, was a pioneer in transducing these electrical signals that the polygraph can read from a plant into sounds. He and his wife reportedly created such a connection with some of their plants, in particular, a cactus, that they were able to teach the plant to count numbers.
I personally believe that this last instance has more to do with a deep connection between the minds of the Hashimoto's and the plant, rather than with an awareness of numbers by the plant.

For more music of the plants (and not only):
https://soundofgoldenlight.bandcamp.com/

http://thesoundhealer.org/

For information on the U1 device:
http://www.musicoftheplants.com/en/

ENJOY!

SIMONE VITALE