Nexus - 0217 - New Times Magazine-pages

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es and on indoor plants, Carlson enlisted the technical expertise of mind, to perch on the top of a tree outside his bedroom window a Minneapolis music teacher, Michael Holtz. Within seconds of and, as if cued by his band maestro's baton, burst into song. Holtz hearing Carlson's ‘cricket chirping’ oscillating out of a speaker, grabbed his tape recorder and managed to register an aria that Holtz realised its pitch was consonant with the early-moming tree- went on and on for nine to ten minutes. In the field guide he top concert of birds outside his bedroom window. found that the little bird registers a high 8,000 cps. Drawn deeper The first cassette, using Hindu melodies called ragas, suitable to _into the subject, Holtz consulted books that detail the structure of an Indian ear, and apparently delightful to both bird and plant, _birdsong, such as Vocal Communication in Birds, Born to Sing, induced stomata to imbibe more than seven times the amount of and Bird Sounds and Their Meanings. He also consulted biologi- foliar-fed nutrients, and even absorb invisible water vapour in the Cal texts to find that tiny villi, minute shaggy hairlike twfts in the atmosphere that exists, unseen and unfelt, in the driest of climatic cochlea of the human inner ear, vibrate to certain ‘window’ fre- conditions. But the sound proved irritating to American horticul- quencies. turalists and farmers, especially women, apart from those few "What I was trying to figure out with Dan Carlson was what whose tastes for the exotic accepted ragas as in vogue. exactly we were oscillating in plants,” Holtz explained. Looking for western music in the range of Carlson's highest fre- Looking at drawings of a cell, Holtz further discovered the rep- quencies, the ones which in Hindu experiments had shown the __ resentation of a subcellular structure within the cytoplasm known best bumper crops of corn, Holtz culled several baroque selections as a mitochondrion. Pointing to the enlarged drawing of one of from The Dictionary of Musical Themes, settling on the first them he asked: "Of what does their shape remind you?" movement of Antonio Lucio Vivaldi'S ——_mmmmmmmes slarce suggested the form of the The Seasons, appropriately called = wooden-bodied sound box of a violin "Spring". “Listening to it time and oes . , or viola. — a a, 1 setlioed tina ..indicating greater growth = Thar’s right!" Holtz exulted. "And I ivaldi, in his day, must have known neg e : : i ing i all about birdsong, which he iried to tivity inher experimental —{pt"ine resonant hequency of mito. imitate in his long violin passages. plants when they Nistened! to _ chondria is 25 cps, which, if interpolat- Holtz also realised that the violin . ed upward, gets to a harmonic of 5,000 music dominant in "Spring" reflected Bach, 1920s Jazz, or Ravi cps, the same frequency used by Dr Johann Sebastian Bach's violin sonatas lo olfare Pearl Weinberger to grow winter wheat broadcast by the Ottawa University Shankar s sitar; whereas exposed two anda half times ont than normal researchers to a wheatfield, which had {go hard rock, ..Within two weeks _ with four times the average number of obtained remarkable crops 66 percent d shoots, as reported in Dorothy greater than average, with larger and the plants were dead. Retallack's The Sound of Music and heavier seeds. Accordingly, Holtz Plants. It could be that the frequencies selected Bach's E-Mjor COT OT OE — Ne uscd vibrated not only the mito- Violin for inclusion in the tape. “I . chondria in the wheat seeds, but the water surrounding them, chose that particular concerto," explained Holtz, “because it has increasing the surface tension and thus enhancing penetrability many repetitious but varying notes. Bach was such a musical through the cell wall." genius he could change his harmonic rhythm at nearly every other Holtz connected this to Retallack's having also discovered that beat, with his chords going from E to B to G-sharp and so on, the transpiration rate rose, indicating greater growth activity in her whereas Vivaldi would frequently keep to one chord for as long as _—_ experimental plants when they ‘listened’ to Bach, 1920s jazz, or four measures. That's why Bach is considered the greatest com- the Indian strains of Ravi Shankar's sitar; whereas exposed to hard poser that ever lived. I chose Bach's string concerto, rather than rock, with the same rate nearly tripled, within two weeks the his more popular organ music, because the timbre of the violin, its plants were dead. harmonic structure, is far richer than that of the organ. "I believe such frenetic music," said Holtz, "was too much for _Holtz next delved into what for him was a whole new world of their overall systems. The intense, grindingly monotonous energy bird melodies. In the 1930s, Aretas Saunders, author of Guide to in that rock sound could have virtually blown the cells apart! Bird Songs, had developed a method of visually representing, Young volunteers for the US Navy who have listened to that type through a newly devised audio-spectrogram, the arias of singing of music since childhood have been rejected because of partial birds that can neither be described in words nor adequately shown deafness, even before reaching the age of twenty.” with any accuracy on a musical staff. ; — ; Asked if one could simply play the recording of a crescendo Soon Holtz came to see where the various predominating pitch- involving all of a symphony orchestra's instruments with their es in birdsongs could be calibrated by reference points on the hundreds of frequencies and harmonics and allow plants to select musical scale and their harmonics. Don Carlson had mstinctively those best suited for their needs, Holtz replied: "You have to take hit upon frequencies that were the ideal electronic analogues for 4 into account a law of diminishing returns. Too big a dose of any- bird choir. “It was thrilling," said Holtz, "to make that connection. —_ thing is not necessarily of greater benefit than just a litt I began to feel that God had created the birds for more than just tiny dose." ss , ae freely flying about and warbling. Their very singing must some- Tt passed! gianificanr thet Hole. the madi : . oer, a = par z usicologist, could say this how be intimately linked to the mysteries of seed germination and without any oelsies of homeopathic reoewmer a y a, = Carson was right," Holtz said nostalgicall Cana. aii oe mies fr Raat Ciey of On wt Charlee “Th gues ge poe e A he ae re Walters's annual eco-agriculture conferences, explained his ey Taga a q € lars is much more silent than ayyroach with lively enthusiasm. "What I've tried all along to do eve bees. illed off many birds and others never seem t0 With the sonic part of Sonic Bloom," he expostulated, his jet-black have taken their place. Who knows what magical effect a bird like hair and pirate beard reflecting the hue of the Westem-cut suit he the wood thrush might have on its environment, singing three sep- wears for public lectures, giving him the air of an Amish elder, "is arate notes all at the same time, warbling two of them and sustain- 19 stay within boundaries set by nature. I think there are certain ing the others! . 1 cosmic forces which can account, however ‘unscientifically’, for One morning while Holtz was mentally bemoaning all the much of our success. Properly adapted they will get plants to species of birds that had vanished from Iowa, a yellow warbler, grow better, perhaps get cows to give more milk, or even inspire looking for all the world like a canary, flew, as if reading his people to relate to one another more harmoniously. There's plenty 24¢NEXUS DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994