PhotoSynth is an immersive, hands-on and collaborative soundscape exhibition where you take to the conductor’s podium to lead your own orchestra of plants! Taking advantage of how electrical signals within plants can be converted to unique, beautiful sounds, our goal is to create a collaborative experience that will help us feel more in touch with nature whilst boosting creativity and inspiration.
What it's all about:
Step into our immersive tent and experience a new way of connecting with nature... through sound. PhotoSynth was based on the hidden electronic signals of plants and has been transformed into an interactive musical experience, featuring abstract models of plants that play audio. As you wander through the space, collect a remote from the desk at the entrance. By pointing it at the lights on the plant pots and moving it like a conductor's baton, you can modulate the volume, inviting you to guide the living orchestra around you.
Our group began with a single question: "What does the work environment look like in a future without nature?"
In a world shaped by deforestation and climate change, we envisioned an opportunity to reintroduce the presence of organic life, not visually, but through sound. PhotoSynth turns the absence of nature into a sensory escape, reshaping the office, classroom, or home environment into one that invites calm, curiosity, and play.
This interaction transforms traditional plant-based biofeedback into an artistic medium, offering a unique experience that reconnects people with the rhythms of nature. By merging environmental awareness with intuitive movement and sound, PhotoSynth reimagines how we might feel present with nature in an abstracted, digital form.
How it works:
We have used several microcontrollers all linked together using a server running on a RaspberryPi 4 to control the inputs from each plant (whenever they recieve IR signals from the user). Each plant is equipped with a simple circuit on a veroboard, containing an ESP32 and an Infra-red reciever. Whenever this reciever detects input from the user (the "baton"), a signal is sent along with a unique identifier to the central RaspberryPi which then sends different signals to the central speaker system.
The sounds played throughout the experience has been hand made using a mix of both FLStudio and Ableton, as well as using different synths such as Surge, TAL-Elec7ro and FLEX. Although the exhibition follows an almost post-modern/steampunk theme, mixing it with the lush greenery of the plants meant that we wanted to add some organic elements to the production. To decide on what the different plants should sounds like, we have researched other examples of nature-sound experiments online, and we also have taken artistic liberties ourselves through sketching and ideating ;) This has been done from recording real instruments such as guitars and basses, as well as the use of warm, analog tape machine noises and reverb.
These features and design choices has together been iterated on to create a unique and hopefully memorable experience which blends the future of technology with the natural beauty of the diverse fauna that we are very lucky to have in our environment. We really hope you have a Bah-Doinking time!! (sorry)
-(the) "Bah-Doinks" team
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