If Plants Could Sing
The Story of Dorothy Retallack
and her Experiments with Music and Plants
by Don Robertson (2005), expanded in 2016
“Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze by the sweet power of music.”
William Shakespeare
“Please send me more information about the experiments where that lady was playing music to plants. I’m duplicating this for a high school project,” said the voice on the phone.
It was another call, and like the many E-Mail messages and phone calls that I had received for almost a decade, the caller was interested in my article on the experiments conducted by a lady who played various kinds of music to plants and then observed to determine if and how the music affected the plants’ growth and health. Apparently a number of young people were interested in these experiments and were attempting to duplicate them in school projects.
Why were they interested?
During the late 1960’s, the lady who had conducted these experiments discovered that the music of certain rock and roll records appeared to nearly kill the plants in her experiments!
I told the caller that I knew very little more than what I had written in the article on my DoveSong.com educational website, and that a lot of scientific work on the subject had yet to be done.
For some people, these experiments are laughable, but they interested me. If they were reproducible, they would provide substantiation for what I have been saying and writing about for decades, that music has a powerful effect on all life, either for good or not.
Dorothy Retallack
Dorothy Retallack was the wife of Denver, Colorado MD, Dr. Louis L. Retallack, and the mother of three children. A singer and an organist, after raising her children she enrolled in the Temple Buell College in Denver, majoring in music.
One of the requirements for a degree was a biology class where she was required to perform some kind of an experiment. Her teacher suggested one involving her major, which was music. She had read about the experiments of George Smith involving the effect of music on the grown of corn that had been conducted in the early 1960’s. In those experiments, Mr. Smith found that corn seed that had been subjected to music sprouted earlier and grew into greener and bigger plants than had plants not subjected to music at all.
The First Experiment
Mrs. Retallack decided to see what the effect of sound would be on plants. For her first experiment, she teamed up with a classmate. It was the spring of 1968. They planted philodendron, corn, geranium, and radishes and played a tape recording that Mrs. Retallack had made where she played just two notes on her piano over and over. The tape was played for 12 hours each day. By the end of the 21st day, the plants were not doing so well.
The school had just purchased three biotronic control chambers. Dorothy decided to continue her experiments that summer, this time using the control chambers. The chambers would isolate the plants from other sounds and disturbances. For the next experiment, she provided the same kinds of plants, and again used the same repeated notes, but she didn’t learn anything new.
Bring in the Radios!
In the fall, a classmate who had been interested in Dorothy’s experiments teamed up with her, using the school’s biotronic chambers to conduct further experiments. She put some squash plants into two chambers, and a radio in each chamber. One radio was tuned to a classical station, and the other to a rock and roll station.
After eight weeks, Dorothy and her friend were amazed at the results. The squash exposed to the classical music had grown toward the radio and had begun to wrap itself around it. But in the chamber with the rock music, the squash vine had grown in the opposite direction.
Intrigued by the results, Dorothy conducted more experiments during the summer of 1969. She placed corn, squash, petunias, zinnias, and marigold plants in two chambers. In one chamber, she placed a radio tuned to an “easy listening” station with “soothing” music, and in the other chamber, a rock station. She turned the radios on for three hours every day. Dorothy watched the chambers in anticipation. She had no idea if she would achieve results similar to those she had conducted with her classmate.
On the fifth day, Dorothy was surprised to see that in the chamber with the easy-listening music, the plants had begun to bend toward the radio, and they were leafing and budding normally, while in the rock chamber, half of the plants had grown taller, but they had smaller leaves. The rest of the plants were stunted in growth!
On the ninth day of the experiment, about eighty percent of the plants in the easy-listening chamber were leaning toward the radio, and the plants in the rock chamber were “bending into grotesque shapes”.
By the fourteenth day, most of the blooms of the flowering plants in the easy-listening chamber were bending toward the radio, but in the rock chamber, the very tall plants were drooping, the blooms having become faded, and all were turning away from the radio.
On the sixteenth day, all but a few marigolds in the rock chamber were dying. Just six feet away in the other chamber, the plants were blooming beautifully.
It’s Time for Jimi and the Zeppelin
Dorothy repeated the experiment with the same results. At this point, she decided to replace the radios with tape-recorded music.
For this experiment, she used three biotronic chambers. Three reel-to-reel tape machines were set up, with only the speaker in the chambers themselves. In the first chamber she played what was at that time commonly called “acid rock” music by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and the rock group called Vanilla Fudge, who were popular at the time.
In the second chamber, she would feature percussion music, and the third chamber would have music without percussion. For the percussion music, she used a recording of steel drums alternating with excepts from an album called Persistent Percussion. The music selections for the third chamber were taken from albums by Earl Grant that were performed by strings, piano, organ, and clarinet.
The result was that the plants in the rock-music chamber leaned away from the speaker, the plants in the percussion-music chamber were leaning away, but not as much, and the plants in the third chamber were leaning toward the speaker.
For her next experiment, Dorothy chose two types of classical music. In one chamber she played North Indian classical music, notably from Ravi Shankar’s Sounds of India album, and in the other, a recording of J. S. Bach’s “Orgelbüchlein”. which were chorale preludes performed on a pipe organ. The plants “liked” the North Indian classical music the best, leaning so close to the speaker that they were almost at a 60-degree angle with lush and abundant growth and strong roots. The plants in the organ chamber leaned toward the speaker about 30 degrees.
She began experimenting with other kinds of music. She tried country music, using recordings of Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Nancy Sinatra, Roger Miller, Ray Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis. She found that this was the only music to which the plants appeared to have absolutely no reaction, leaning neither toward nor away from the speakers.
She tried jazz music, providing the plants with recordings of Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, the Original Ten Dixieland Rhythm Kings, Al Hurt, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, and Pete Fountain. She assumed that since rock and roll music was said to derive from jazz music, that there would be similar effects, but the experiments surprised her. A little over half of the plants leaned toward the speaker about 15 or 20 degrees.
In the spring of 1970, the college informed the Denver’s evening newspaper, the Denver Post, of Dorothy Retallack’s experiments. The post asked her to perform an experiment that they could photograph and feature in the paper. For this experiment, she used the same “acid rock” of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Vanilla Fudge as before in one chamber, and then in another chamber she decided to try something new. She would play discordant 20th-century classical music.
For the discordant music, she selected sections from Arnold Schönberg’s fourth string quartet, “Five Movements for String Quartet” by Anton Webern, Alban Berg’s “String Quartet Opus 3”, “Zyklus” by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and works by Harvey Sollberger and Harold Faberman. This is all very discordant music.
The plants in both chambers, the discordant classical chamber and the rock chamber, grew leaning away from the speakers, more pronouncedly in the rock chamber. The Denver Post published a four-page article on June 21, 1970. Soon after, the article appeared in over 500 newspapers and magazines in the USA and Europe through a syndication service.
Going National
The article attracted national attention, and soon Dorothy Retallack was contacted by CBS news asking if she would perform an experiment using time-lapse photography. Since the North Indian classical music and the acid rock had had the most profound effects so far, she decided to conduct another experiment using these two musics in two chambers and a third chamber that was silent. The time-lapse cameras from CBS would be trained on all three. The result, broadcast on the Cronkite Evening News on October 16, 1970, was spectacular. She said that the plants performed “almost like they knew they were on camera”.
Soon after the telecast, I got wind of Dorothy’s experiments. I was living in California at the time, but being a Denver native, I called her on my next trip to my hometown. I was extremely interested because her findings completely matched my own personal discoveries about music: discoveries I had been making since 1968.
My discoveries were entirely subjective, and so I was very interested in something that could be demonstrated. It made perfect sense to me that plants would react to music, just as my own personal energy system reacted so very much to music. On a personal level, I cannot tolerate being in the room where hard rock or discordant “classical” music is being played. It completely shatters the harmonious energy field in my body, something I happen to be very conscious of, throwing it out of balance. I was using North Indian Classical music for meditation purposes at that time, and that was having an extremely positive effect on me.
Talking with her on the phone, she lamented that little follow-up work had been performed.
She published her findings in a small book called The Sound of Music and Plants.
In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published a book called The Secret Life of Plants. It addressed the earlier plant and music experiments that Mrs. Retallack had performed.
Other Experiments
The knowledge of the effects of music that we have been describing had actually long been known, but not by many people. Years before, T.C. Singh in India stated that he had proved beyond all doubt that “harmonic sound waves” affected the growth, flowering, fruiting and seed-yields of plants by his experiments of playing traditional South Indian ragas to plants. During the 1960s, he had performed ragas in rice fields and had obtained 25 to 60 percent higher yields than regional averages.
Arthur Locker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin piped music into his greenhouse in the late 1950s and found that his plants grew straighter, germinated quicker, and bloomed more abundantly. About the same time, Canadian Eugene Canby broadcast Bach violin sonata to a plot of wheat, producing a crop that was 66 percent greater than normal, with larger and heavier seeds.
In 1979, as I began collecting more data and had begun lecturing on the subject of positive and negative music, I created my own experiment. in my Santa Rosa, California, backyard, I put together a wooden frame on top of a small table and covered it with clear plastic sheeting. First I played Arnold Schönberg’s discordant opera Moses and Aaron to the plants during the day from a boom box inside of this chamber, then after they had all died, I replaced them with new plants from the same stock and played the completely concordant sacred music by 16th-century composer Giovanni da Palestrina during the day. These plants flourished.
Since the historic experiments of Dorothy Retallack, very little followup appears to have been performed, except, of course, for experiments performed by school students.
For example, a 10-year-old Augusta, Georgia boy named Daniel McElmurray, created a prize-winning science fair project where he demonstrated the effects of classical, country, and rock music on his father’s 500-cow dairy herd. After listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Shania Twain, and non-twentieth-century harmonious classical music, the cows demonstrated that they preferred classical to country and rock by producing 1,000 pounds more milk for Daniel’s father.
In another experiment, reported in the The San Francisco Examiner of Sunday, August 19, 1979, Chris Johnson, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, reported that with experiments that he had performed at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, Dolphins were indifferent to Pink Floyd, but swam in a synchronized whirl to the music of J.S. Bach.
What About the Music in Our Lives?
I have found in my almost fifty years of work in this area that many people are absolutely afraid of discovering that perhaps the music that they cherish and listen to could actually be something that is negative.
It is time to reexamine the changes in culture that took place during the 20th century.
If we were to take the plant experiments seriously, the conclusion would be that music not only “hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (to state the famous quote (usually misquoted) from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride) but could also have an opposite, deleterious effect. This is what I am going to explore next: the amazing effect that music has not only on plants, but on everything…including us.
We already know that human beings are affected by music, that it can help raise our spirits, rejuvenate our bodies, and make us laugh or cry. Listening to music can trigger emotions that range from the greatest of sorrows to the most exalted ecstasy.
It is for this reason that the motion picture and television industries have invested so much money in providing background music for films, shows, and commercials. It’s not for our entertainment. It’s to heighten the physical, mental, and emotional response to what is being viewed on the screen. These industries know that while our attention is riveted on the action, the music is working on our emotions. Richard Wagner realized this in the 19th century and with this in mind, he transformed the art of opera into music drama.
Have you ever turned the sound off on your TV during a really intense action scene, where the music is moving at a fast and furious pace, or in a really creepy horror film, where the music alone is enough to fully frighten a person, and then noticed how much less you react to the action on the screen?
Background and soundtrack music is very powerful. Many people have become so “used to” the music that forms a backdrop for their lives that sometimes they are not even aware of it. But the subconscious mind is always aware of it…all of the time.
Many people today bathe in a continual sea of electronic music that plays in the background (electronic music being any music that is produced by speakers or earphones). Music accompanies us while we shop, while we drive, while we study, while we eat and sleep… music is playing when we ride an elevator or wait for a robotic person to answer the phone at “customer service”. I have met people who never turn off their TV sets. They have told me that the relative quiet would drive them insane!
Many years ago I discovered the power of music, and I have worked with that power since that time to produce healthful, healing, and spiritually uplifting effects. I know that this is real.
When I was playing an 80-string zither tuned to the most harmonious of all musical scales, the pentatonic scale, I created music that produced amazing results. One time, I put a whole barnyard of animals to sleep, chickens, horses, cows, pigs, birds, simply by performing a beautiful 20-minute improvisation on my zither. There was another time when I put a whole nursery full of hyperactive preschoolers to sleep by just playing the piano.
Some may ask “How is that possible?” I will start with a simple scientific phenomena called resonance.
Resonance
Resonance is the process known to science where energy from one system is transferred to another. In the case of music and sound, when a note is sung or played, the sound waves extend outward, like ripples in a pool of water after a stone has been thrown in. Everything in the radius of the waves of sound resonates with that sound according to the thickness of the matter, and how much in harmony the matter is with that note and its inner notes (called overtones).
When things resonate, they have a harmonic equivalence. Harmony is the principal of the Universe that maintains balance and cohesiveness. When we achieve perfect harmony in music, we align ourselves with the movements of the stars and the atoms.
We have all heard about the opera singers who can shatter a crystal goblet simply by singing a note. The Italian singers Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli were supposed to have accomplished that feat. How did they do it? They first tapped the glass with a spoon to determine the note that it produced, and then they sang the same note with perfect precision, causing the glass to resonate. If a singer can cause it to resonate like this while increasing the volume of his or her voice, the glass will eventually shatter.
This is why soldiers are told to break step when crossing bridges. There are all kinds of projects one could delve into to investigate the relationship of sound with matter further. By means of sound alone, geometrical figures have been created in sand and water. YouTube is filled with information about these things.
One way to demonstrate musical resonance can be accomplished with an acoustic piano. Pianos have little damper arms lined with a soft material that press against each string.
When you press a key on a piano, a hammer strikes the string. The right pedal on a piano is called the sustain pedal. When you press that pedal, all the dampers are pulled away from the strings. In this state, none of the strings on the piano are muted. With the strings unmuted, sing a note into the piano, where the strings are.
If you sing a note that is the same as any of the notes that the piano strings are tuned to, the strings that correspond to that note will resonate. When you stop, the sound continues from the strings while you hold the sustain pedal down, then slowly the sound dies away. In fact, more than one set of strings (notes) will sound in response to the overtones of the note that you sang.
We are able to see that sound vibrations are powerful because of this obvious effect on matter. The sounds, arranged to make music, affect us all…
Vibes
We can see from our examples of resonance that sounds are waves, vibrations, or “vibes”. What is the nature of these sound waves? In the fifth century, the Greek philosopher Democritus stated the following: “Sweetness and bitterness, cold and warm, and all of the colors exist only in the mind and not in reality.” It has taken many years for scientists to realize that what Democritus was saying was true. Everything is really only the manifestation of waves of energy: matter, color, light, sound, air. We have waves of electricity, radio waves, x-rays… these we already knew about, but did you know that the big rock out in your garden was just another wave phenomenon?
Sound is produced when atoms (the particles of matter) are set into motion and create a vibration which instigates a chain reaction among the atoms that surround them, thus creating waves of energy. These waves circle outward, like the ripples that spread in a pond of water after a rock has been dropped into it. All phenomena are produced this way, not just sound: light, heat, taste, smell, electricity, radio signals, x-rays, magnetism, and all of the different kinds of radiation and rays. What differentiates one from another is the speed of the vibrating atom. This was what Democritus was saying, and this is what the Hindu texts speak of when they refer to maya: the illusion that is this world. The experience of the outer world reaches us through our five senses: waves of energy vibrating at a particular frequency, then decoded by our brain.
The ancients knew about atomic vibration. They wrote that the elements of atoms themselves, the electrons, were actually vibrating particles spinning around the atom’s nucleus in the same manner that our planet Earth orbits the sun. Additionally, they knew that each electron spins upon an axis of its own, like our planet. But this knowledge was too advanced for the common man to understand, and so it remained veiled in the background.
Louis de Broglie
During the year 1925, however, a scientist named Louis Victor Pierre Raymond duc de Broglie announced this fact to the scientific community. Electrons, he said, had the same characteristics as sound, replete with overtones. No wonder plants, animals, humans, as well as pure physical phenomena such as a wine goblet or the strings of a piano, react to sound vibrations!
At first, he was laughed at, but soon, the scientific community began to take what de Broglie was saying seriously. After all, the great mathematical genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had written many years before: “I am able to prove that not only light, color, sound, heat, and the like, but also motion and shapes are mere apparent qualities.”
There is an old riddle that says, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it fall, does it make a sound?” The answer is yes, because the vibrations of sound are always produced when the tree falls.
Realizing that everything is vibratory in its essence, and that musical sounds are vibrations that cause effects within their radiating distance might bring about some startling realizations when one gives all of this some thought!
