Creating Musical Experiences with Plants: Concert Design and Live Mediation in Plant-Based Performance

This article examines the design of plant-based musical performance from a practitioner-research perspective, focusing on a concert system in which electrical variations captured from three plants are transformed into sound, visual display, and live musical form. Rather than treating plants merely assources of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) notes, the project develops a concert architecture in which vegetal signal variation can influence pitch, register, articulation, density, timing, silence, audiovisual cues, and spatial differentiation. The article situates plant-based performance on a continuum between anthropocentric musical design and a more phytocentric orientation of attention toward vegetal variability, while acknowledging that sensing, mapping, instrumentation, dramaturgy, and interpretation remain human-designed. Through a three-movement form—Calibration, Diversity, and Plantocontrol—the performance moves from a relatively transparent gesture–signal–sound relation toward increasingly differentiated and temporally unpredictable musical behaviours. Practice-based results include the preservation of silences, ostinatos, rapid bursts, repetitions, abrupt accelerations, articulation changes, and moments of saturation as compositional material. The article argues that the significance of plant concerts lies less in the simple sonification of biosignals than in the construction of a performative situation in which vegetal variability, digital mediation, and human compositional intention coexist. The project calls this relation organic aleatorics: a form of musical indeterminacy conditioned by continuously changing signals acquired from living organisms and their electrical environment.