I spend a lot of time in two worlds that might seem unrelated: music and plants.
One involves violins, mandolins, guitars, electronic sounds, melodies and rhythm. The other involves apples, raspberries, blueberries, vegetables, herbs, soil, rain, insects and the annual question of whether anything I planted is actually going to cooperate.
Lately I've been thinking that the separation between those worlds may be artificial.
Music begins with vibration. A violin string moves the bridge, the bridge moves the body of the instrument, the body moves the air, and eventually that moving air reaches an ear. Walk outside and essentially the same thing is happening everywhere, although most of it wasn't created for our benefit. Wind moves branches. Insects vibrate wings. Birds push air through their respiratory systems. Rain strikes leaves. Trees creak. Water moves through soil.
A garden is an extraordinarily complicated acoustic environment.
And apparently the plants aren't entirely silent either.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University reported in Cell in 2023 that tomato and tobacco plants subjected to dehydration or cutting produced airborne ultrasonic sounds. Healthy plants were much quieter. Even more remarkably, researchers could use machine learning to distinguish the condition of a plant from its sounds. The frequencies are mostly above human hearing, so this doesn't mean you can walk through the tomatoes and hear them complaining that you forgot to water them. But it does mean that a plant can produce information-bearing vibrations that travel through the air.
That's a wonderful fact for a musician who grows things.
It also makes me wonder how much of the world around us exists outside the little window our senses allow us to experience. The garden I hear isn't necessarily the garden a moth, bird or mouse hears. My version is only one mix of a much larger recording.
Birds were doing this long before we were
Birdsong presents an even more obvious bridge between nature and music.
Calling birdsong "music" can get scientifically slippery because we don't know that a bird experiences its song the way a human experiences Bach, bluegrass or a fiddle tune. But some of the similarities are remarkable. Songbirds learn vocalizations by listening to adults, retain auditory memories and go through an immature "subsong" stage that has been compared to human infant babbling. Researchers have found parallels between birds and humans in vocal learning at behavioral, neurological and even molecular levels.
Rhythm isn't exclusively ours either. One study comparing human musical performances with birdsong found categorical rhythmic patterns in thrush nightingales resembling patterns found in human music.
So when somebody sits on a porch and says that a bird sounds musical, that observation isn't as scientifically ridiculous as it might first appear.
The bird isn't playing our music.
Perhaps we're both exploiting some of the same possibilities contained in sound.
Then there's the violin
There is another connection that I've spent most of my life holding under my chin.
A violin is largely a botanical object.
The traditional instrument depends heavily upon spruce and maple, selected not merely because they're attractive but because of their physical and acoustic characteristics. Spruce used for soundboards has a particularly useful combination of relatively low density and stiffness, allowing vibrations to travel efficiently through it. Maple serves different structural and acoustic roles in the back, ribs and neck. Researchers continue studying how species, grain structure, aging and other properties of wood influence musical instruments.
Which means that before a violin was a violin, much of it was a tree.
Before somebody played a fiddle tune on it, there were years of sunlight, rain, cold winters, dry summers and growth rings. The environment became part of the material from which the instrument was eventually made.
I've played violin for most of my life, and I still find something satisfying about that. The musician isn't simply playing on nature. In a very literal sense, nature is participating in making the sound.
The bow complicates the story further. So do resins, varnishes and all the other natural materials humans have recruited over centuries to make instruments respond the way we want them to.
Musical technology didn't begin with synthesizers and computers. Humans have been engineering the natural world into sound-making machines for thousands of years.
The rhythm of growing things
But there is a less scientific connection between music and gardening that I think may be just as important.
Neither can be hurried very successfully.
You can practice faster. You can fertilize more. You can buy better equipment. You can analyze everything to death. But ultimately a phrase has to breathe and a plant has to grow at something resembling its own pace.
Both involve repetition without exact repetition.
A bluegrass tune may go around again, but the second time isn't precisely the first. The bow lands differently. Somebody accents another beat. A player hears something and answers it.
Gardening works that way too. Spring comes around again, but it isn't the same spring. One year the raspberries go crazy. Another year something eats them. One apple tree flourishes while the tree six feet away seems to spend the entire summer contemplating whether life is worth the effort.
You learn patterns, but you also learn not to trust patterns too much.
That may be one reason traditional music and agriculture have lived beside each other for so long. Agricultural communities produced work songs, harvest songs, planting songs, seasonal dances and music tied to particular times of year. Music helped organize labor, certainly, but it also helped people mark the recurring structure of life.
Before recorded music allowed us to hear virtually anything at any moment, music itself was often seasonal.
So was almost everything else.
Listening instead of filling the silence
Modern life has done something peculiar to listening. We've become very good at filling empty acoustic space.
Put in earbuds. Turn on the radio. Start a podcast. Stream a playlist.
I love recorded music and electronic music, so I'm hardly going to argue for turning all of it off. But there's something to be said for occasionally letting a place provide the soundtrack.
Henry David Thoreau paid extraordinary attention to sound. His journals repeatedly treat birds, bells, wind and human music as inhabitants of the same acoustic world. In 1852 he described distant piano strings drifting through gardens and elms until he felt himself "attuned to the universe."
That word attuned is exactly right.
A musician learns to listen for tiny things: intonation, attack, decay, resonance, silence, the space between notes.
Growing things teaches another version of the same skill. You notice the first buds. A change in leaf color. Whether the soil feels dry. Which insects suddenly appeared. Whether the birds are behaving differently. Whether October smells different from September.
Attention is the common skill.
Maybe that's the connection I've been looking for between music and botanicals.
It isn't that plants secretly play symphonies, or that every birdsong contains some hidden human melody. Nature doesn't need to imitate music in order to be musical.
Music and gardening both train us to notice change unfolding through time.
A note begins, changes and disappears.
A seed germinates, grows, fruits and dies back.
A tune returns.
Spring returns.
Neither returns exactly the same way twice.
And perhaps that's why, after spending so much of my life making music and now so much time growing things, they don't feel like two separate interests anymore.
They feel like two different ways of learning how to listen.
