Plant Sounds Pt. II

PROJECT 
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Plant Sounds Pt. II

60 Hz and a little something extra

 

Interfacing with the plant is proving to be more difficult than anticipated. While the current prototype was picking up some kind of signal, there was a considerable amount of 60 Hz interference. This is because the plant virtually acts as antennae. There was a small, irregular signal overlaid the 60 Hz, but we couldn't conclude if it was noise interference or the plant. Nicely enough, interacting with the plant did cause reactions in the collected signal, mostly in the form of amplitude variation. Although these tests weren't a complete victory, it did bring to light some potential fixes.

60 Hz PROBLEM

To rectify the issue of 60 Hz interference, we may go with an instrumentation amplifier. A Faraday cage would be ideal to isolate the electronics and the plant, but then the installation would just be a box. It just wouldn't be the same.

ELECTRODE PROBLEM 
The electrodes we are currently using are copper-based and super ghetto (soldered by yours truly). Switching to silver-chloride electrodes may prove to be prosperous — as almost all biological electrode systems use Ag/AgCl electrodes (oops... my bad). Ideally, I would have micro-electrodes capable of measuring intracellular ionization. 

PLAN B

Wheatstone Bridge

We have started to develop the alternative circuit that would measure micro-voltages with a different approach. The new method detects a micro-voltage across a varying resistance of the organism within a Wheatstone bridge. The data will be collected and output through Arduino code. Max/MSP (the software being used for the soundscape) has the capacity to read, format, and interpret the serial data. In this way, it will be a mixture of 'audification' and 'sonification'. Charles Dodge is well known for working in this style (see attached video). 

Today we will finalize the schematic and decide on the required electronics. There may be some difficulty augmenting the existing circuit with the Wheatstone bridge, but Marc is a bona fide champion in this regard. ONWARDS & UPWARDS!

Charles Dodge — Earth's Magnetic Field (1970)

Lots of Love,
Thom

(more info on sonification)