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About Positive Music
by Don Robertson
The Plant Experiments
In 1973, a woman named Dorothy Retallack
published a small book called
The Sound of Music and Plants.
Her book detailed experiments that she
had been conducting at the Colorado
Woman’s College in Denver using the
school’s three Biotronic Control
Chambers. Mrs. Retallack placed plants
in each chamber and speakers through
which she played sounds and particular
styles of music. She watched the plants
and recorded their progress daily. She
was astounded at what she discovered.
Her first experiment was to simply play
a constant tone. In the first of the
three chambers, she played a steady tone
continuously for eight hours. In the
second, she played the tone for three
hours intermittently, and in the third
chamber, she played no tone at all. The
plants in the first chamber, with the
constant tone, died within fourteen
days. The plants in the second chamber
grew abundantly and were extremely
healthy, even more so than the plants in
the third chamber. This was a very
interesting outcome, very similar to the
results that were obtained from
experiments performed by the Muzak
Corporation in the early 1940s to
determine the effect of "background
music" on factory workers. When music
was played continuously, the workers
were more fatigued and less productive,
when played for several hours only,
several times a day, the workers were
more productive, and more alert and
attentive than when no music was played.
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Dorothy Retallack
and Professor Broman working
with the plants used in
music experiments. |
For her next experiment, Mrs. Retallack
used two chambers (and fresh plants).
She placed 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! 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 dying. In the other
chamber, the plants were alive,
beautiful, and growing abundantly.
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"Chaos, pure chaos":
plants subjected to Led
Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix
didn't survive |
Mrs. Retallack’s next experiment was to
create a tape of rock music by Jimi
Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and Led
Zeppelin. Again, the plants turned away
from the music. Thinking maybe it was
the percussion in the rock music that
was causing the plants to lean away from
the speakers, she performed an
experiment playing a song that was
performed on steel drums. The plants in
this experiment leaned just slightly
away from the speaker; however not as
extremely as did the plants in the rock
chambers. When she performed the
experiment again, this time with the
same song played by strings, the plants
bent towards the speaker.
Next Mrs. Retallack tried another
experiment again using the three
chambers. In one chamber she played
North Indian classical music performed
by sitar and tabla, in another she
played Bach organ music, and in the
third, no music was played. The plants
"liked" the North Indian classical music
the best. In both the Bach and sitar
chambers, the plants leaned toward the
speakers, but he plants in the Indian
music chamber leaned toward the speakers
the most.
She went on to experiment with other
types of music. The plants showed no
reaction at all to country and western
music, similarly to those in silent
chambers. However, the plants "liked"
the jazz that she played them. She tried
an experiment using rock in one chamber,
and "modern" (dischordant) classical
music of negative composers
Arnold Schönberg and Anton
Webern in another. The plants in the
rock chamber leaned 30 to 70 degrees
away from the speakers and the plants in
the modern classical chamber leaned 10
to 15 degrees away.
I spoke with Mrs. Retallack about her
experiments a few years after her book
was published, and at that time I began
performing my own experiments with
plants using a wood-frame and
clear-plastic-covered structure that I
had built in my back yard. For one
month, I played three-hours-a-day of
music from Arnold Schönberg’s negative
opera Moses and Aaron, and for
another month I played three-hours-a-day
of the positive music of
Palestrina. The effects were clear.
The plants subjected to Schönberg died.
The plants that listened to Palestrina
flourished.
In these experiments, albeit basic and
not fully scientific, we have the
genesis of a theory of positive and
negative music. What is it that causes
the plants to thrive or die, to grow
bending toward a source of sound or away
from it?
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