Letter from Tony Bassett.
Background research
Book: "The Secret Life of Plants"
by: Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.
Publishers: Harpers and Row.
Extract from Chapter 10 "The Harmonic life of Plants"
An interesting and eventually very controversial
series of experiments on the effect of music on plants began in 1968
when Dorothy Retallack, a professional organist and mezzo soprano,
who gave concerts at Denver's Beacon Club from 1947 to 1952, felt
herself at loose ends when her eight children went of to college .Not
to be the sole member of the family without a degree, Mrs Retallack
surprised her own family with the her own enrolement for a degree
in music at the Temple Buell College. Required to come up with a laborotory
experiment in biology, Mrs.Retallack vaguely recalled reading an article
about Goerg Smith's playing disc jockey to his cornfields.
Following Mr.Smiths lead, she teamed up with a fellow student, whose
family provided an empty room at home and furnished two groups, which
included included philodendron, corn, redishes, geraniums and African
violets. The neophyte experimenters, supended Grolux lights over one
group and played the taped musical notes B and D sruck on the piano
every second, alternating five minutes of silence.The tape played
continuously twelve hours a day. During the first week,the African
violets,drooped at the start of the experiment revived and began to
flower.For ten days all the plants in the group seemed to thrive;
but by the end of the third week all the plants, some as if blown
by a strong wind,had died,with the unaccountable exception of the
African violets, which somehow remained outwardly unaffected, The
control group,allowed to grow in peace flourished.
When she reported these results to her biology professor, and asked
if she could do a more elaborately controlled experiment for credit
in his course, he reluctantly consented."The idea made me groan a
little," said Broan afterwards,"but it was novel and I descided to
okay it, even though most of ther other students laughed aout loud."
Bromman made availiable to Retallack three new Bitronic Mark3 Environmental
Chambers fifty feet long, recently purchased by his department,similar
in shape but much larger than home fish aquariums,which allowed for
precise control of light temperature and humidity.
Alotted one chamber for a control group, Retallack used the same
plants, with the exception of the violets, as in the first experiment,
on scedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to
survival,each day she tried an F note, played unremittingly for eight
hours in one chamber and three hours intermittantly in another. In
the first chamber her plants were stone dead within two weeks. In
the second chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left
in the silence.
Mrs.Retallack and Prof.Browan were nonplussed by by these results;for
they had no idea what could be causing the disparate reactions,and
could not help wondering whether the plants had succumbed to fatigue
or boredom or had simply been "driven out of their minds". The clearcut
experiments aroused a spate of controversy in the department, with
both students and professors either dimissing the whole effort as
spurious, or intrigued by the inexplicable outcome. Two students ran
an eight week experiment on summer spashes, broadcasting music from
two Denver radio stations into their chambers, one specialising in
heavily accented rock.the other in classical music.
The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms:those
exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and other eighteeth
and ninteenth-century European scores grew towards the transistor
radio, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other
spashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb
the slippery walls of their glass cage.
Impressed by her friends success, Mrs.Retallack ran a series of similar
trials in early 1969 with corn, sqush,petunias,zinnias and marigolds;
she noticed the same effect. The rock music caused some of the plants
to first to grow either abnormally tall and put out ecessively small
leaves or remain stunted.Within a fortnight all the marigolds had
died, but only six feet away identical marigolds, enjoying the classical
strains,were flowering. More interestingly, Mrs.Retallack found that
even during the first week the rock-stimulated plants were using much
more water than the classically entertianed vegetation,but apparently
enjoying it less,since examination of the roots on the eighteenth
day revealed that the soil growth wa sparse in the first group, veraging
only about an inch, whereas in the second it was thick, tangled and
about four times as long.
At this point, various critics sourly suggested that the experiments
were invalid because such variables as sixty cycle hum, the "white
sound" heard from a radio tuned to a frequency not occupied by a radiotransmitter,
or the announcers voices emitted by the radio sets had not been taken
into account, To satisfy these cavils, Retallack taped rock music
from records. She selected the extremenly percussive rock renditions
of Led Zepplin, VAnilla Fudge and Jimi Hendrix. When plants leaned
away from this cacphony, Retallack rotated all the pots 180 degrees,
only to see the plants lean in the opposite direction. This convinced
the majority of critics that the plants were definatly reacting to
the sounds of the rock music.
Trying to determine what it was about rock music that so jarred her
plants .Retallack guessed that it might be the percussive component
in the music and started yet another experiment in the fall. Selecting
the familiar Spanish tune "La Paloma,"she played one version of it
performed on steel drums to one chamber of plants and another version
of it on strings to a second. The percussion caused a lean ten degrees
away from the the verticle in Retallack's plants, but nothing compared
to the rock. The plants listening to the fiddles leaned fifteen degrees
toward the source of the music.
Jazz caused her a real surprise. When her plants heard recordings
as varied as Duke Ellingtons "Soul Call" and two disc by Louis Armstrong,
55 percent of then plants leaned fifteen to twenty degrees toward
the speaker, and growth was more abundance than the silent chamber.
Meanwhile Retallack was called by CBS television and asked to set
up a rock-versus-Shankra experiment for filming with time-lapse cameras.
She was releived when the plants performed as if they knew they were
sceduled for national broadcast . The experiment was aired on Walter
Cronkite's newscast......
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