Some people talk to plants, but Salishan Coastal Lodge in Gleneden Beach, Oregon is offering guests a chance to actually listen to them.
The resort’s newly-renovated Jacobsen Suite has been enhanced with a new and unique “Plant Listening Suite” experience in partnership with a company called PlantWave. The company’s technology offers a unique connection to the natural world, blending wellness with innovation by allowing guests to listen to music created by the plants. Guests who book this suite can enjoy a serene, self-guided Plant Listening experience, where local, seasonal plants paired with the PlantWave device create soothing, plant-generated music for a peaceful connection to nature.
According to PlantWave, the device uses two sensors to send a signal through a plant and measure its conductivity. The conductivity of a plant is largely related to how much water there is between the two sensors. So, as a plant is photosynthesizing and moving chloroplasts around, PlantWave is sensing these tiny shifts and graphing them in real time.
If you graph shifts over time, you get a wave. PlantWave analyzes this wave’s frequency and matches it to its nearest frequency of a musical note. That note becomes a digital signal sent from the PlantWave device to the PlantWave app, which has instruments designed for plants to play.
So, the plant’s frequency related to movement of water through its system is represented as a musical note and this is all happening super quickly and continuously. For that reason, we end up hearing a continuous stream of notes coming from plants, resembling a melody. Or, if a plant is inactive, it might not produce any music at all, or just play one note repeatedly.