MUSIC AT DeMorgenzon
SARAH DAVIDSON'S OBSERVATIONS 0F THE DANCING PLANT
At a small nursery in rural northeast Thailand, I am reminded of one of my all-time favorite research papers, which we read in David Dalton’s Plant Molecular Biology journal club the fall semester of my senior year of college. It was the postdoctoral work of ASPB member Janet Braam when she was in Ronald Davis’s lab at Stanford University, a 1990 Cell paper that first began to elucidate the function of TCH genes. I surmised that the water treatment had likely originally been a control, and Braam was probably stumped as to why everything she treated her plants with induced the expression of her favorite genes. Finally, she found an effective negative control. It was Figure 2, “Expression of TCH genes is induced by a wide variety of stimuli,” that made the paper memorable, and it was the second to last sentence in the figure legend that prompted our professor to ask us to clarify something for him. It read: “Plants were exposed to Talking Heads music at approximately 60 decibels for 1 minute.” (“What are Talking Heads?” he asked.)
There is little to nothing in the scientific literature to suggest that playing Talking Heads to plants would have any effect on plant gene expression, which is why I am a little dumbfounded as I stand here at the Udorn Sunshine Nursery gazing at a leguminous shrub, a secret hybridization formula of Codariocalyx motorius, also called Desmodium gyrant and, more commonly, the telegraph plant.
I remove my iPod from my backpack and attach a small microphone, which doubles as a tinny speaker. I select a track of Maria Callas—an operatic performance of Il Barbiere Di Siviglia accompanied by plenty of strings—and max out the volume. The young leaves of the dancing plant begin to fulfill their promise, responding with a back-and-forth motion reminiscent of the ding-dong motions that mark passing seconds on a grandfather clock.
Orchid enthusiast and original proprietor of Udorn Sunshine Nursery Dr. Pradit Kampermpool first made the cross that brought one of Thailand’s more moving plants into being about 40 years ago. Legend has it that the plant was used in ancient Thailand as a remedy against several diseases, perhaps due to its high antioxidant properties, which have since been studied by researchers at Thailand’s Mahasarakham University. Over time the plant came to be seen as more of a weed, and it all but disappeared until Kampermpool went on jungle crusades through Laos and China’s Yunan province in search of it. He then resurrected the plant, bringing parents from locations around Southeast Asia together to manifest their dance in hybrid progeny once more.
Kampermpool spent seven years of intense breeding for music responsiveness to arrive at the plant on display at the nursery today. Kampermpool passed away last December, but his family members still look after the nursery, one of Udon Thani’s more intriguing attractions. Kampermpool’s son Praniparn, who once studied horticulture in Utah (despite having a difficult time with “all those Latin names”), emerges from the family house adjacent to the nursery to answer some of my questions. According to Praniparn, their dancing plant is most active in the cool season, still one month away, and in the morning and evening. He also tells me that the plant responds better to “natural” music or whistling rather than tunes from electronic devices such as my iPod. The dancing plant is especially fond of sax and violins (the actual instruments, rather than the Talking Heads song by that name). Praniparn also says that the plant has become popular with patients with mental disorders and HIV, who claim that speaking to the plant and watching it move has a soothing effect.
Although plants that dance to music have yet to make their debut in plant physiology texts, the movements of Desmodium did not escape the keen eye of Darwin, who in 1837 wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, “Now I want to tell you, for my own pleasure, about the movements of Desmodium…. The little leaflets never go to sleep, and this seems to me very odd; they are at their games of play as late as 11 o’clock at night and probably later.” Darwin spent more than two decades researching the movements of plants and published a monograph titled The Power of Movement in Plants shortly before his death. In his studies of Desmodium, Darwin never mentioned playing music to the plant, but rather observed plant movements in response to small droplets of water placed on the surface of the plant. Darwin concluded that the plant’s locomotive powers functioned to shake water off the leaves after heavy rainfall.
In the early 1970s, Dorothy Retallack performed a series of experiments at the Colorado Women’s College on the effect of music on plants. Initial experiments involved playing continuous tones to some plants and intermittent tones to others. Interestingly, her results were consistent with experiments conducted by the Muzak corporation several years earlier.
Her plants, like Muzak’s factory workers, performed better when played to for several hours several times a day, as opposed to continuously. In subsequent experiments Retallack found that plants responded positively to easy listening music when compared to rock music and that her plants showed far more interest in music heavy on stringed instruments than the likes of Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix.
Investigations on whether plants are conscious music critics or whether this is all bunk pseudoscience could make for some excellent Ig Nobel prize research in the plant sciences. In the meantime, you may want to think twice before you reach for the radio dial in the lab.
At a small nursery in rural northeast Thailand, I am reminded of one of my all-time favorite research papers, which we read in David Dalton’s Plant Molecular Biology journal club the fall semester of my senior year of college. It was the postdoctoral work of ASPB member Janet Braam when she was in Ronald Davis’s lab at Stanford University, a 1990 Cell paper that first began to elucidate the function of TCH genes. I surmised that the water treatment had likely originally been a control, and Braam was probably stumped as to why everything she treated her plants with induced the expression of her favorite genes. Finally, she found an effective negative control. It was Figure 2, “Expression of TCH genes is induced by a wide variety of stimuli,” that made the paper memorable, and it was the second to last sentence in the figure legend that prompted our professor to ask us to clarify something for him. It read: “Plants were exposed to Talking Heads music at approximately 60 decibels for 1 minute.” (“What are Talking Heads?” he asked.)
There is little to nothing in the scientific literature to suggest that playing Talking Heads to plants would have any effect on plant gene expression, which is why I am a little dumbfounded as I stand here at the Udorn Sunshine Nursery gazing at a leguminous shrub, a secret hybridization formula of Codariocalyx motorius, also called Desmodium gyrant and, more commonly, the telegraph plant.
I remove my iPod from my backpack and attach a small microphone, which doubles as a tinny speaker. I select a track of Maria Callas—an operatic performance of Il Barbiere Di Siviglia accompanied by plenty of strings—and max out the volume. The young leaves of the dancing plant begin to fulfill their promise, responding with a back-and-forth motion reminiscent of the ding-dong motions that mark passing seconds on a grandfather clock.
Orchid enthusiast and original proprietor of Udorn Sunshine Nursery Dr. Pradit Kampermpool first made the cross that brought one of Thailand’s more moving plants into being about 40 years ago. Legend has it that the plant was used in ancient Thailand as a remedy against several diseases, perhaps due to its high antioxidant properties, which have since been studied by researchers at Thailand’s Mahasarakham University. Over time the plant came to be seen as more of a weed, and it all but disappeared until Kampermpool went on jungle crusades through Laos and China’s Yunan province in search of it. He then resurrected the plant, bringing parents from locations around Southeast Asia together to manifest their dance in hybrid progeny once more.
Kampermpool spent seven years of intense breeding for music responsiveness to arrive at the plant on display at the nursery today. Kampermpool passed away last December, but his family members still look after the nursery, one of Udon Thani’s more intriguing attractions. Kampermpool’s son Praniparn, who once studied horticulture in Utah (despite having a difficult time with “all those Latin names”), emerges from the family house adjacent to the nursery to answer some of my questions. According to Praniparn, their dancing plant is most active in the cool season, still one month away, and in the morning and evening. He also tells me that the plant responds better to “natural” music or whistling rather than tunes from electronic devices such as my iPod. The dancing plant is especially fond of sax and violins (the actual instruments, rather than the Talking Heads song by that name). Praniparn also says that the plant has become popular with patients with mental disorders and HIV, who claim that speaking to the plant and watching it move has a soothing effect.
Although plants that dance to music have yet to make their debut in plant physiology texts, the movements of Desmodium did not escape the keen eye of Darwin, who in 1837 wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, “Now I want to tell you, for my own pleasure, about the movements of Desmodium…. The little leaflets never go to sleep, and this seems to me very odd; they are at their games of play as late as 11 o’clock at night and probably later.” Darwin spent more than two decades researching the movements of plants and published a monograph titled The Power of Movement in Plants shortly before his death. In his studies of Desmodium, Darwin never mentioned playing music to the plant, but rather observed plant movements in response to small droplets of water placed on the surface of the plant. Darwin concluded that the plant’s locomotive powers functioned to shake water off the leaves after heavy rainfall.
In the early 1970s, Dorothy Retallack performed a series of experiments at the Colorado Women’s College on the effect of music on plants. Initial experiments involved playing continuous tones to some plants and intermittent tones to others. Interestingly, her results were consistent with experiments conducted by the Muzak corporation several years earlier.
Her plants, like Muzak’s factory workers, performed better when played to for several hours several times a day, as opposed to continuously. In subsequent experiments Retallack found that plants responded positively to easy listening music when compared to rock music and that her plants showed far more interest in music heavy on stringed instruments than the likes of Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix.
Investigations on whether plants are conscious music critics or whether this is all bunk pseudoscience could make for some excellent Ig Nobel prize research in the plant sciences. In the meantime, you may want to think twice before you reach for the radio dial in the lab.