Plant Music!

Inflorescent Crescendo is interactive art installation that features plants which make music when touched. Plant Music is the hardware and software code behind the project.

Scratch Setup

0. Requirements

• Ableton Live (To be phased out)
• Pure-Data
• Processing 3
• Arduino IDE
• A plant sensor! Ours was built 4 sensors on an Arduino Mega modeling this Touché tutorial.

1. Arduino Code

1. Clone this SweepingCapSense library into your arduino/libraries folder
2. Load the simpler.ino project onto the arduino.

• If you monitor the serial, remember the baud-rate is set at 19200.

2. Interpreter (Processing)

1. Open Processing and make sure the libraries sound and oscP5 are loaded.
2. Open the interpreter.pde project in the processing/interpreter folder, change the portSelected variable to match your serial port setup.
3. Run

• There are flags in the main file for testing and debugging the project.

3. Pure-Data(PD) App

1. Make sure you have a virtual midi driver running on your computer. On Mac, in the Audio Midi Setup, you want to click the check box for Device is online for IAC Driver. On Windows you can use LoopMIDI
2. Open user-states.pd in the pd folder.
3. In PD, open the Preferences > MIDI... settings. Make sure your virtual midi driver is selected in the Output Devices. Click Save All Settings
4. Click "Global On/Off" in user_states
5. Open the whole_sequence patch and the osc-receiver-vanilla sub patch. Click the 'Serial Data Toggle' to start seeing input from the interpreter.
6. Click the calibration patch in osc-receiver-vanilla and in each colored box set the threshold at which you want to register a touch for each plant.

4. Ableton Project

1. Open your Ableton project of choice and click play on the track with instruments you want to play.

5. Plant Sensors

• Wire up the sensors to the plant. Tends to work best when copper wire is wrapped around the stalk of a dense plant, but shallowly burying the wire in the moist dirt of an ivy also works. Most ferns don't work well.
• For testing you can use a glass of water.