Desert Songs - Biodata to MIDI

Desert Songs uses Plantwave - a small device that translates biodata from organic material into MIDI. It’s not magic and the plants are not composing, it’s simply biofeedback creating true organic “randomness“. Tiny changes in electrical current - the plants act as variable resistors. Cacti was used for this project due to their very sparse and sporadic activity. The cacti garden includes a few different specimens hooked up to probes, and outputs for individual plants can be changed as you go using patch points upfront. The MIDI signals are sent to a Korg NTS-1 for simple waveshaping and then drenched in atmosphere using the Microcosm from Hologram Electronics. To complete the biolab environment look, a custom MIDI visualizer was made mimicking chloroplasts under microscope.