Showcase

A slight brush or wind causes the plant to sing a chord, creating an interactive moment with some houseplant cuttings. Pressing the leaf with different amounts of force activates either 1, 2, 3 notes of a chord, a pleasant sound that is almost like listening to a wind-chime.

This is achieved with a piezo contact microphone, a transducer that detects mechanical vibrations to transform into measurable signals.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cim20fhXO58z_N1ZbLvsYHvwAc6ZahUN/view?usp=drive_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cim20fhXO58z_N1ZbLvsYHvwAc6ZahUN/view?usp=drive_link)

A demo of the different notes that plays depending on the pressure and amount of force put on the plant leaf

I think anyone would love to receive a singing plant friend! 🌱

Process

Ideation

Brainstorming

I struggled a bit with deciding what I wanted to make for this project—there’s a lot of ways people have made musical instruments using basic electronic parts and programming on an Arduino (e.g. water glasses, theremins) so I struggled with finding something creative. BUT I was inspired to look into using piezo contact microphones after seeing a lot of cool intersection-of-nature-and-technology products and going to a concert for an artist I’ve been listening to for a long time.

Highly recommend listening to this while reading through the documentation :)

Field recording using contact microphones: https://www.leaf-audio.com/contact-microphone

Sarah Kinsley is pretty famous for her contact mic that she uses to create swan-like, orchestral, ethereal sounds from her own voice. She self-produces all of her songs, and it’s pretty cool to see people hand make their own electronics for music: https://tatrck.com/h/0Hu30uVO0x7R?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40sarahkinsleyd%2Fvideo%2F7486989211870973226https://tatrck.com/h/0Hu30uVO0x7R?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40sarahkinsleyd%2Fvideo%2F7486989211870973226https://tatrck.com/h/0Hu30uVO0x7R?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40sarahkinsleyd%2Fvideo%2F7486989211870973226 https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahkinsleyd/video/7486989211870973226

Prototyping

Coding

I used these sites to research how I could have my Arduino send a signal back to my website to play a sound using different libraries: https://www.cs.carleton.edu/faculty/dmusicant/cs102s18/pages/page380839.html, https://docs.arduino.cc/built-in-examples/digital/toneMelody/. I ultimately went with a program that used a Python sound package instead (https://simpleaudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), and focused the Arduino code on reading out signals form the different piezos.

I chose to have 3 notes (partially a limitation by the number of wires I had and non-defunct piezos), and went with a personal favorite chord of F-A-C. This was supported a lot with using Claude code.

Prompt 1

Claude provided a pretty workable python and Arduino package to work with as I tested using only 1 contact mic. I then transitioned to using 3 contacts and changed the code.

Prompt 2

I had to fiddle around with the sampling rate and landed with 44100 HZ. Additionally, the piezo sensitivity required a lot of extra work to find the right threshold that was able to detect my hand touching the leaf BUT not to the degree that it would be constantly buzzing.

I encountered this error quite frequently with my first code when I was using the python sounddevice package: ||PaMacCore (AUHAL)|| Error on line 2796: err='-50', msg=Unknown Error. I worked with Claude to change it to the simpleaudio package, which (as in its name…) was more simple because of its dependency-free audio playback design.