Plants and Music

Today morning I saw a really interesting news report on farmers in Punjab. It showed that in one district in Punjab, Singur, farmers had not used pesticide on their farmlands for two years now and instead, they had started playing classical music for them. The growth was the same as it was two years ago. I was baffled beyond words. Apparently, all they do is they play some classical piece twice a day, two hours at a time. The growth was the same and thus this has resulted in organic food now. They also saved on all the money they used to spend on pesticides.

It was amazing and thus I decided to check it up online. Apparently, plants do react to music in the same manner as humans and animals do. More than the sound itself, what they react to is the vibrations that come off the speaker. And just like in the manner that some music is good for them, an overdose can kill them also. In 1973, Dorothy Retallack wrote a book ‘The Sound of Music and Plants’ based on scientific experiments. In it, she observed was that plants that listened to music three hours a day grew thrice as large and twice as strong as the plants that were placed in the music-free environment.

On the other hand, she was also surprise to see the overdose of music. A plant that listened to music eight hours a day died in two weeks. Then Retallack performed an experiment of different nature. She played different type of music for each plant. While one plant listened to the rock music, another one listened to the soft and soothing numbers. This time also the results were surprising yet conclusive. The plant that listened to rock music became sickly small, while plants that listening to soft smoothing numbers grew healthily and had bigger size. Another interesting observation was that this plant grew towards the radio from which the music was being played.

I feel that this is a very interesting observation. Maybe, if all the farmers decided to follow this procedure, we could all be eating organic food rather than food full of chemicals.