Rhizomessages · Technical system
Biofeedback Score
Living plants on stage generate the notation that human performers read — in real time, as they play.
Overview
Plants as collaborators, not instruments
At the heart of Rhizomessages is a custom system that captures the bio-electrical activity of living plants on stage and converts it into notation, pushed live to performers' iPads. As the plants respond to light, heat, and sound vibration, the music the performers read changes with them.
The distinction matters: existing tools like PlantWave and MIDISprout turn plant signals directly into sound, with the plant as a passive source. Here the plant is a collaborator, and the human musician is the interpreter standing between the signal and the sound.
Signal path
From root to staff
Four stages carry a plant's electrical activity to a readable score:
How it works
The stages in detail
Capture — the plant
A custom ESP32-based IoT device reads bio-electrical signals directly from living plants on stage. The hardware sits at the boundary between the botanical and the digital.
Stream — the network
Captured signals are streamed over MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol, letting the plant data move continuously and in real time to the processing layer.
Process — the translation
Signals pass through Python into Max/MSP, where the bach computer-aided-composition library maps the incoming data into pitch and rhythm — the compositional heart of the system.
Notate — the performer
The generated notation is pushed to performers' iPads via Mira, so the musicians read and play a score that is being written, live, by the plants beside them.
At a glance
The stack
Research
Writing & documentation
The system is described in a co-authored ICMC 2026 paper with Nicolo Merendino and Massimo Sterlino, "Co-Composing with Plants: Early Experiments in Bio-Responsive Score Design," covering the IoT architecture, the signal-to-notation pipeline, and the questions that arise when a non-human system takes part in composition. The work proposes a non-hierarchical network in which plant, algorithm, and performer act as co-equal collaborators.
Documentation
The system in pictures
Three figures document the device and its output.
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