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What happens when plants and humans
Affective Feedback Loops, Sonic Plants, and Other Weird Circuits
This experimental project—BioSymphony—asks a deceptively simple question: What if your houseplant could make music based on how it feels around you? Not just a vibe check, but an entangled interspecies jam session powered by sticky electrodes, Raspberry Pi, and a MIDI synth.
Project Overview:
Here’s the setup: plug a plant into a Biotron, let its bioelectrical signals flow through a sonic interface, and boom—sudden spikes become synth arpeggios, calm moments stretch into ambient pads. It’s glitchy. It’s moody. It’s not “the plant plays music”—it’s we co-compose through affect.
Underneath the leaves and wires is a rich theoretical framework rooted in affect theory (Ahmed, Brennan), posthumanism (Haraway, Bennett), and a healthy skepticism of feel-good greenwashing (Schuller, Berlant). This isn’t about anthropomorphizing your fern—it’s about listening to what grows in the space between you and it.
The plant becomes part of a feedback system: you affect it, it affects the sound, the sound affects you. It’s less about meaning, more about mutual signal distortion.
This is not a song. It’s an affective loop.
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 Biosymphony uses a hacked-together music interface to explore the strange and subtle relationship between humans and plants. The concept is to attach electrodes to a plant, process its bioelectrical signals, and turn those into MIDI notes. When you’re near, when you touch it, when the light shifts…
It sings. (sort of)
Except… it doesn’t “perform.” It pulses, glitches and resonates.
 Theory: Feeling-With, Not For
 BioSymphony is rooted in:
Affect theory: Emotions don’t belong to individuals; they circulate (Ahmed, 2004; Brennan, 2004).
Posthumanism: Agency is distributed; life is entangled (Haraway, 2008; Bennett, 2010).
Critical empathy Be wary of feel-good sentimentality (Schuller, 2018; Berlant, 2011).
Instead of projecting human feelings onto a plant, BioSymphony listens to the plant’s signals as they are—and lets the human attune to that.
Technical Details
- A Biotron device captures bioelectric signals from a houseplant.
-  Signals are routed into a Raspberry Pi running MIDI translation scripts.
- These signals control OnlineSynths in real time:Â
- Â Touch, proximity, and mood (both human and environmental) shape the output.
- The system doesn’t filter out interference embraces it
-  Your presence is noise in the system. The plant doesn’t mind. It responds anyway.
References (APA 7)
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Cornell University Press.
Chamovitz, D. (2012). What a plant knows: A field guide to the senses. Scientific American.
Gagliano, M. (2017). The mind of plants: Thinking the unthinkable. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 10(2), e1288333. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2017.1288333
Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.
McCrae, R. R. (2021). Music lessons for the study of affect. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 760167. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.760167
Schuller, K. (2018). The biopolitics of feeling: Race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century. Duke University Press.
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Do anthuriums dream of electric sheep
D0_Anthuri#um_Dr34m_Of_El3ctr¡c_Sheep() What happens when plants and humans Affective Feedback Loops, Sonic Plants, and Other Weird Circuits This experimental project—BioSymphony—asks a deceptively simple question: What if your