Weird and wonderful members of the plant kingdom - if music be the food of love .

In 1973, a woman named Dorothy Retallack placed plants in special sound-proofed chambers containing speakers through which she played both abstract sounds and particular styles of music. She watched the plants and recorded their progress daily and was astounded at what she discovered.

At first she experimented with beeps, but soon she moved on to music by placing radios in each chamber. In one chamber the radio was tuned to a local rock station, and in the other the radio played a station that featured soothing 'middle-of-the-road' music. Only three hours of music was played in each chamber. On the fifth day, she began noticing drastic changes. In the chamber with the soothing music, the plants were growing healthily and their stems were starting to bend towards the radio, but in the rock chamber, half the plants had small leaves and had grown gangly, while the others were stunted. After two weeks, the plants in the soothing-music chamber were uniform in size, lush and green, and were leaning between 15 and 20 degrees toward the radio. The plants in the rock chamber had grown extremely tall and were drooping, the blooms had faded and the stems were bending away from the radio. On the sixteenth day, all but a few plants in the rock chamber were in the last stages of collapse. In the other chamber, the plants were growing well.

Why is this? Well, it's probably not anything to do with rock music, per se. Sound is a wave, and more specifically, a pulse wave, which means it is formed by areas of higher and lower pressure in the atmosphere through which it travels. It's pretty unlikely that such tiny fluctuations in air pressure could have any effect on a plant's growth. There is very little difference, to a plant, in music and ambient noise. However . plants which are exposed to music may grow more than plants that aren't. Not because the plants themselves respond to the music, but because their caretakers do! Maybe Mrs Retallack wasn't a rock fan and liked a bit of Mantovani, and her care for the plants was influenced by her own preferences?

Rock Music photograph by Lorri37, used under a creative commons attribution licence