Nothing makes me happier than to find an excuse to begin a column with a shout-out to yet another unrecognized female scientist. (And there are far too many). Actually, “excuse” is misleading. There is no convoluted path between Dorothy Retallack and this exploration of plants and award-nominated music, courtesy of my preferred LLM.

In fact, she is the gravitational center of it. The Wikipedia-page-deprived Dorothy was the first person to build a scientific foundation for the theory that playing music to plants could make them happy. Or sad.

Yes, Plants Have Musical Preference

She conducted her horticultural orchestration at the Colorado Woman’s College in Denver — using the school’s three “Biotronic Control Chambers” — and published her findings in a small and sadly-out-of-print book “The Sound of Music and Plants.” ($136 for a paperback!)

Dorothy did three trials. First, she exposed one group of plants to a constant tone for eight grueling hours. Which violates the Geneva Horticultural Convention. (Reminds me of the “dark prison” in Afghanistan where prisoners were subjected to Eminem and Dr. Dre for 20 days.)

The second group got intermittent exposure. The tortured plants in the first chamber died within 14 days.

Her next experiment involved soothing "middle-of-the-road" music versus rock music. The elevator music provoked healthy growth; plants started to lean towards the radio.

In the rock chamber, the plants produced small, stunted leaves, and after two weeks “were in the last stages of dying.”

The final experiment started with Jimi Hendrix, Vanilla Fudge, and Led Zeppelin. The plants literally turned away from the music. Thinking it was the percussion, Dorothy played the same songs on steel drums. Now the plants leaned just slightly away. 

But when the same song was played by strings, the grooving plants bent towards the speaker.

This was the breakthrough. Not only did plants react to music, they had specific — and vaguely geriatric — tastes, driven by frequency, intensity, and vibration.