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This message comes from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, whose discovery of bone marrow transplants has saved over a million lives worldwide. Learn how this and other breakthroughs impact the world at fredhutch.org slash look beyond. This is The Poll, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott.
I've driven about an hour to a suburb near Philadelphia to meet Baby. I think I just heard her. You did. Yep. She's calling to me wondering where I went. She was in a really good mood after getting her shower and everything. Oh, she gets a shower? Yeah. I'm surprised because Baby is a parrot, a blue and gold macaw. Somebody, you're going to need a friend.
Amber Guzzi was six years old when Baby joined her family. We got her when she was a baby. She's 29, I believe, 29. I'm 35. So it's been a long time. So we're kind of like sisters. Right now, Baby is perched on a branch in a very large cage in Amber's backyard. And she's eyeing me suspiciously. What do you think? I think she's going to be okay.
Are you nervous? That's okay. Baby stays quiet but moves a tiny bit closer. You want to come out? Yeah, you want to come out and say hi? Macaws are one of the really cool birds with their intelligence. So they are fantastic at mimicking sounds and words. Puppy!
And that's why I wanted to meet Baby, because I wanted to learn more about how other species communicate. And usually, Baby talks a lot. The main ones that she does are my sister's name, which is Crystal, my name, Amber. She also knows some other phrases and words like, come here, stop it, what are you doing, upy, give me kiss. But not today. Say Crystal, Crystal, Crystal. Baby, you're killing me right now.
Crystal. Baby gives me the side eye and stays quiet. Amber had warned me that Baby usually doesn't talk in front of strangers. But when Baby's alone, she even practices her speech. I will hear her in the other room figuring out the best way to say a word. And she tends to do it with my name the most. She'll go, Amber. Amber. Amber.
Amber. It's like she's practicing how to say these words and it's solely on her own. Amber and Baby also sing songs together. And Amber says it really feels like they're communicating. Like this morning when Amber first walked up to Baby's cage. And she goes, hi. I didn't say anything yet. And I went, hi, Baby, how are you? And she starts bobbing her head. She goes, Baby, Baby. And I'm like, you want to come out? And then she goes, come here, come here.
Amber told me Baby started talking again the moment I left. And later, she sent me a video of Baby pretending to answer the phone. Hello? I really wanted to talk with Baby that day, but I realized she wasn't going to budge, probably because she had no reason to talk to me or to try to impress me. And whatever we might have said to each other would have been limited in scope.
Humans often dream of having conversations with animals, really understanding what they are thinking and feeling to break down that communication barrier. And it's not just animals, but also plants and even aliens. On this episode, Beyond Human Communication, bridging the gap between us and other species.
Researcher Gavin Steingow says we already communicate with animals all the time. I think that any pet owner would be very aware of this, that this is not a figment of our imagination. We know that we can communicate with animals
A dog, by calling it, we can communicate with a cat by stroking it and it feels something, absolutely. But then we tend to make this communication bigger than what it is. We speculate about the feelings or inner thoughts of animals. You know, the dog is lonely today. That's why it's acting this way. Or thinking about cats as having some sort of mystical presence.
And I think that these two facets of human-animal communication are always in play. On the one hand, the kind of very prosaic sense in which we know we are communicating. And on the other hand, this tendency that we always have to go beyond what we can know. Gavin has a new book. It's called Interspecies Communication, Sound and Music Beyond Humanity.
Maybe the most famous example of the imagined communication with animals is the story of Clever Hans, a horse that could supposedly do complicated math and other impressive tasks. And it appeared that the horse was able to
answer through taps of its hoof on the ground, quite complicated questions. But when a scientist studied the dynamic between the trainer and Hans, he realized that the horse was just reacting to subtle cues from the trainer, who wasn't even aware that this was happening. So the trainer himself thought that the horse was doing these things, that Hans was doing these things, when in fact he was not.
There definitely was communication between the horse and the trainer, just not about math. And so this has been now used as a sort of allegory or a metaphor for a dilemma that we have whenever we're working with animals. We think that we're noticing things, but in fact we're sort of reading into them or imagining them or even worse...
We're getting the animals to do the things we want them to do. Do you think we're capable of leaving this other part of desiring the communication to go further? Do you even think we can not do that? Because when we have a very basic interaction that feels like communication with a non-human animal...
then I think instinctively or immediately, we want to go beyond that. That desire is part of what communication is. Communication is not simply transmission of information. Communication is not simply conveying an idea between minds. There has to be a desire to say something, to ask something, to request something. So fear, desire, these things are actually part of what communication is.
So in a way, possibly no. I think that it is a sort of inevitable tendency of communication because that is in some sense a defining feature of what drives us to communicate in the first place.
Despite these challenges, many scientists are trying to get a deeper understanding of how animals communicate. And they now have a new tool at their disposal: AI and machine learning algorithms. What kind of difference is that making? Alan Yu reports. Behavioral ecologist Jacqueline Aubain has studied beluga whales in Quebec's St. Lawrence estuary for years.
These are the plump white whales. They are bigger than dolphins, smaller than killer whales.
They communicate using whistles, calls, and clicks. On research days, Jacqueline puts an underwater microphone in the river to listen to their communication. Belugas are a very vocal species. They're often called the sea canaries because of how loquacious and vocal they are. The St. Lawrence River is huge, with busy shipping lanes running between Canada and the U.S. Jacqueline's goal is to understand which areas are important to the belugas.
so they can tell the shipping companies where to consider setting aside quiet zones. But to get to that point, Jacqueline has to evaluate a lot of beluga sound recordings. What I was doing in the lab was I was sitting at my computer and I was scrolling through hundreds and thousands of hours of recordings. My eyes would get very tired and I wasn't able to focus on the screen that long. She is looking for specific calls.
that the belugas use to communicate with each other. So it's a call that has two components. So the animal is producing two sounds at the same time. One of the components that's always the same across all individuals is a series of very fast pulses that the animal is producing. So it kind of sounds like a creaky door. So that's one component of that call. The other component of the call is often going to be a whistle. Whistle.
That second part, the whistle, is unique to each beluga. Here are two different belugas doing their whistle part in their own way.
Jacqueline studied this audio manually for a year. And then one of her collaborators put her in touch with a computer scientist. They turned to machine learning, which is a specific form of artificial intelligence. They trained a model so that a computer could scroll through all of that audio and flag the interesting bits. Which really ramped up the process and allowed me to...
Being able to process the data so quickly meant that Jacqueline could more easily connect the underwater audio of the calls to video recordings that show her what the belugas are doing when they make a specific call.
She basically went from studying silent movies of belugas shot from a drone to having videos where she can tell what is happening at the time of a particular call made underwater. She still cannot tell you what exactly the belugas are saying, but she does know what some specific calls are used for. For instance, she has learned that beluga mothers will use a contact call...
to get a curious calf to return to her side. You know, if you're just watching from the drone, you don't really have a great understanding of what happened there. Did the calf get scared by something? Or did the calf just decide it was time to go see mom again? But if we're listening, what we'll often hear is that before the calf goes to rejoin the mother, the mother will emit a call.
AI, specifically machine learning, has led to similar kinds of breakthroughs in studying sperm whales.
These are the largest toothed whales. Sperm whales can dive deeper than nuclear submarines and can live for as long as 70 to 90 years. They are also social animals. Whale biologist Shane Garrow has studied a particular group of 35 sperm whale families in the Caribbean for almost 20 years.
He and his collaborators have gotten to know these whales so well, they have named most of them. And we don't do this flippantly. It makes an important point about who they are. Using names is sort of a shortcut, a reminder that actually each individual is different. And we've shown that their behavior is different. The sounds they make can be different. How they swim or how deep they go can be different.
At first, that kind of seems surprising. But when you think about it, these are large, big-brained, long-lived animals like us. Shane says scientists have long realized that whales are communicating with each other in sophisticated ways.
He has been recording these whale families for years. But recently, he worked with a group of computer scientists to study this trove of audio in new ways with the help of machine learning. Here's how he explains it. Imagine an alien who does not understand human speech puts a microphone in the middle of a coffee shop.
You're going to collect multiple conversations at the same time. You're going to collect all the barista noise and the ding of the bell when the door gets opened. You're going to record all of that stuff. And you're not going to know if any of it is the language or not.
Maybe there are a few words everybody is saying, like coffee or milk. But who is talking to whom? Are they all talking to each other? If you have three tables in the coffee shop and it's two, two and two people, is that one conversation of six?
Or is it three conversations of two? So it's not just separating the sound and applying that sound to each individual. It's also trying to figure out when multiple conversations are happening at the same time, who is talking to who? Like who's the signaler and who's the receiver? Using an algorithm to go through the data allowed them to analyze their materials on a much deeper level. Specifically, how whales communicate different concepts.
Humans combine words in different orders with different tones to change the meaning of what they say to each other. You can say, I'm fine, and mean it. Or say, I'm fine, and those two sentences mean different things. Spoon whales vary the rhythm, tempo, and duration of their clicks in a similar way.
And computer scientist Pratyusha Sharma says this insight has transformed the way that scientists understand sperm whale communication.
She worked on this with Shane. It's called Project SETI, spelled C-E-T-I. Not to be confused with SETI, spelled S-E-T-I, which is about alien intelligence. Anyway, back to the whales. There are hieroglyphics, right, where every symbol represents a certain meaning. And there's the alphabet system where every word is assembled by stringing together a set of alphabets. And you can combine these alphabets in many different ways to convey many different types of meanings, right?
Like, you can combine the letters A, E, S, and T to say "seat" or "eats". Pratyusha says scientists now know that sperm whale clicks are more like an alphabet than they are like symbolic hieroglyphics. That means sperm whales can vary different parts of their cores to form a much larger variety of things to say to each other.
This kind of system, a combinatorial system, is rare in nature. Humans have a combinatorial communication system. So do some primates and bird songs have this combinatorial basis. And there needs to be like the right kind of communicative, environmental and social pressures to even give rise to the system. For biologist Shane Garrow, this is the kind of insight that makes AI really useful in his research.
It's not that we didn't have the data to ask that question. The technology, the method, made that a lot easier to ask. And we found something dramatically new. Research like this excites animal behaviorist Kon Slabochikov.
He says this makes him think of another recent experiment where scientists played back the sound of humpback whale calls to a whale and the whale responded. And as we get better at it, and as our dictionary of animal signals gets better, we might be able to have much more sophisticated kinds of playbacks.
So, for example, if we had a whale human translator, we could potentially say something like, how are you today? And the translator would go, and the whale would respond, and the translator would say, just fine, how are you? I mean, this is totally hypothetical, obviously, but
I think that we're getting in the realm of possibility. Kahn has dedicated much of his research to studying prairie dog calls. Now he is the chief scientist and founder of Zoolingua, a company working on a human dog translation system. He says he cannot discuss details for now, but guesses that it is around five years away.
However, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel says AI and the breakthroughs it has led to will not be able to break all the language barriers between humans and other animals. He studies communication in Egyptian fruit bats at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
For example, human scientists can study animal behaviors in contexts we can see and understand, like fighting, eating, sleeping, mating, and so on. But what if the animals are behaving in ways that us humans cannot even imagine, because they are so different from what we can think of? For instance, sperm whales and belugas navigate the world using cliques.
most humans cannot picture what it would look like to navigate the world entirely using sound rather than sight. These are barriers that will not be crossed. I think that it's still very, very interesting to see how far we get. I don't think we've reached a dead end. I do think machine learning will allow us to take things further, but I think these obstacles are fundamental.
But being able to talk to animals is not really the point of the research for Shane Garrow. He says the point is to understand what is important in the whale's world so that humans can change our behavior accordingly.
He refers to a quote from writer Cormac McCarthy, who was a friend of famous humpback whale researcher Roger Payne. He has this great line in one of his books, which is, you know, what if God comes back and asks you if you've figured it all out? And then before you can answer, said, hey, did you ever consider asking the whales? And then looked around and said, where have all the whales gone? That story was reported by Alan Yu.
We're talking about breaking down the communication barrier with other species. The desire to decode animal language is often fueled by an appreciation for them, a desire to connect more deeply. About 20 years ago, author and naturalist Cy Montgomery got a flock of chickens from a friend. And I gotta tell you, from day one,
I was surprised and in awe of these chickens. Tsai says she came to understand these animals as social creatures that have meaningful communications with each other and with other species. Don't dismiss them as feathered automatons who walk around saying, bark, bark, bark.
Sai writes about what she learned in her new book, What the Chicken Knows, a new appreciation for the world's most familiar bird. Now, the chickens recognized you. They recognized other members of your family. They even recognized some other animals you had in your yard. Was that surprising to you? Yes, I was astonished. I mean, it wasn't that surprised they recognized me.
But I was quite surprised when I read a study showing that each chicken can recognize a hundred other faces. And they were looking at chicken faces, but they also recognize human faces and other animals' faces as well.
And that was exciting to me because chickens look at the same part of whoever it is they're looking at to recognize that we do. They look at the face. And they tested this. This was a fun job for some researcher. They could dress up the chickens so that they were, you know, wearing a chicken sweater or change the look of their wings or the color of their feathers differently.
And the chickens still recognized each other. But if you gave them a mask, like a fake comb or messed with their beak, then they became confused, just like you and I might if our friends were wearing a mask.
A chicken is a social being who's attached to their friends and their flock. A flock social unit relies heavily on how they communicate with each other through sounds, vocalizations, or calls. This couple in Australia, the Evanses,
did a number of studies and identified 24 different calls that chickens give to announce various different things, such as a predator and whether the predator is from the sky or on the ground, and whether the predator is rapidly approaching or seen far away.
They also discovered that roosters will call about food and they will increase the frequency of the call, like the urgency of the call. Like, you really don't want to miss this. This is fantastic.
They also know that these birds aren't just saying stuff because they have some emotion and they're just announcing it because they can't help it. They know they have an audience. Another group of researchers did a series of tests with roosters using mirrors. They understand what their reflection is in the mirror, if you give them ecologically relevant reasons to understand that.
And if you show a rooster in a hall of mirrors that there's a predator overhead, he sees that predator, but he won't say a thing.
If instead of a hall of mirrors, he's surrounded with other chickens, he will call out and talk about that predator. So they are definitely saying things knowing they will be understood by other members of their flock. How did you communicate with your chickens? Well, probably badly. I can't really do a lot of chicken calls.
I didn't know what all of their calls meant, but I think I mostly communicated with my chickens through gentle touch.
And just through the affection that they could feel that I had for them. How do you understand the chickens on their own terms without anthropomorphizing them too much? You know, it's sort of like, obviously, what we do as humans, we look at an animal and we kind of think that they think what we're thinking. It's easy to do. So how do you try to understand chickens on their terms? Yeah.
Well, I kind of go in with beginner's mind. I don't know what to expect and whatever they're going to teach me, I'm going to be happy with. And I also totally recognize that they're not just little people in feathers. You know, they definitely have a different agenda. They also are gifted with senses that we do not have.
So when your dog pricks up his ears and begins barking and you can't see a thing, your dog isn't saying nothing. They hear something you can't hear. They can hear noises above the threshold of human hearing. And all birds can see stuff we can't. Polarized light, for example, and colors that we don't experience. So I go into it knowing that, you know, they're equipped with senses we don't have.
They have agendas we don't have, but they also have many of the emotions that we do have or some version of it. So I am as enchanted with the differences as the similarities. And the similarities allow us to be friends, but it's the differences that I think are
allow us to experience awe in their presence. Sai Montgomery is an author and naturalist. Her new book is What the Chicken Knows, a new appreciation for the world's most familiar bird.
We're talking about the communication barrier with other species. Why do we want to bridge that gap? Gavin Steingone, the author of Interspecies Communication, told me about one interesting reason that has motivated scientists. We should learn to communicate with animals because it will prepare us for communicating with aliens. For example, that has been a thread that's run through a lot of Cold War science. So this idea that
Learning to communicate with one kind of creature will help us with another, I think is really part of it. But it turns out communicating with outer space is very different from analyzing whale or chicken sounds. We looked here. We looked at these stars with these methods for these kinds of signals, and we didn't find anything. That's next on The Pulse.
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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. Probably as long as humans have looked up into the night sky, seeing the twinkle of distant stars, we've wondered, are we alone? Are there other civilizations out there? And if so, what do they look like? And what do they sound like? Like this? This is The Pulse.
Or like that. Scientists have scanned the universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence for decades. But they are not listening for something that sounds like language. They are looking for techno signatures. Ideally, we want to find something that is coming from beyond our solar system.
That looks like it's being created by technology, because that would be good evidence that there's some life out there in the galaxy that can create technology like ours. That's Sophia Shaikh. She is an astrobiologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the SETI Institute, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in California.
If scientists do detect a signal that seems to stem from technology, here's their next question. How do you tell whether it's just some human technology, something like Bluetooth or satellites or cell signal, or whether it's actually coming from beyond the solar system? So let's start with the first question. How can you tell that it's technology? How do you know the difference?
I mean, one thing that helps us out is that humans have been doing radio astronomy now for several decades. And so we have a pretty good idea of what the universe looks like when you look at it through a radio telescope or a radio dish. And some objects, things like the cores of dead stars, like neutron stars or black holes, are very loud and produce a lot of radio waves.
And other objects, like kind of average main sequence stars like our sun, don't produce any at all, almost. And so once we know what can be created by natural objects, then we can sort of rule out those kinds of signals and look for anything that doesn't really match.
And so that's the strategy that we use most of the time is coming up with signal shapes or frequencies or classes that, as far as we know, the natural world just doesn't really produce on its own. And then if you hear something, you're like, hmm, that sounds interesting. How do you then know it's not something that was created by humans? That part is actually almost the trickier part.
So a lot of my research focuses on something we call narrowband signals. And these are radio signals that transmit at one very, very specific frequency. So if you think about like a laser, like could be a very, very specific color of green or red, same idea, just in radio wavelengths that our eyes can't perceive. So we look for these sort of radio lasers and we know that out in the universe, there's nothing that makes this kind of signal naturally.
But humans use them all the time. Even things like radio stations or the way that I'm recording audio into this call are modulated by these narrowband signals. So when I look for narrowband signals, like in a single night of observing, I'll find millions of them.
And so then it becomes sort of a needle in a haystack style problem where we have to look at these signals and say, well, does it seem like they're coming from a very specific spot on the sky or are they just sort of around in the environment at the observatory? And what kinds of frequencies are we seeing them at? And does that line up with human technology?
So there's this whole checklist that we go through to try to determine whether any given signal is coming from some human transmitter nearby or whether it's truly coming from somewhere far out in the galaxy. For this work, Sophia deals with distances and time spans that are really hard to imagine. Our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri,
is about four light years away from us. I mean, to me, that's by itself even a bit mind-blowing, right? Like, the nearest star to the Earth, it takes four years for any signal that we would send to reach Proxima Centauri. And for the kinds of volumes of space that we're searching with a lot of these searches for radio signals...
We're looking out hundreds of light years, maybe thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, depending on the kind of transmitter we're looking for.
So these are pretty big swaths of our galaxy that we're able to interact with and search with radio waves, which of course we could never do, at least right now, with any kind of spacecraft or space probe. So some of the signals we might catch could also be ancient then. Yes, that's true. We may be able to see signals that were emitted thousands of years before they reached us, which is...
Sort of a fun, almost time travel aspect to the work as well. Wow. And then by the time we reply, that place might no longer exist or it might have already not existed for thousands of years, right? Yes, absolutely. It's very weird to work in a field where the timescales are just so immense compared to a human lifetime. Yeah.
Computers help scientists sort through the vast amount of data they collect while listening to the universe, but in the end, humans have to inspect anything that's really of interest. That's how observers came across a signum that seemed to be coming from Proxima Centauri. It was informally dubbed BLC-1, Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1.
And this signal was very interesting because it was definitely narrowband. So that's that radio laser idea where we know that it couldn't be produced naturally. And so a lot of the next steps were looking at the features of this signal and trying to determine whether it seemed to be coming from human technology on Earth or out in space. And at first, it had a lot of features that seemed to point to a potential origin in space, which was really exciting.
But the more we dug into this signal, the more we realized that it seemed like it was some sort of transmitter nearby that was malfunctioning in a very particular way that made it pass our filters. But we're doing more and more searching every year. And so I expect more of these things to be discovered as we keep going with larger and larger surveys.
How do you make sure that you are thinking about this communication that may be coming our way in such a way that it's not human-centric, if that makes sense? You know, so if we're thinking about communication coming toward us as something similar to what we might be putting out, we might be missing things, right? Because...
whatever is out there might be communicating in a totally different way. So what are some of the pitfalls you have to be careful of? There are a ton. This is a very difficult aspect of our work because at the end of the day, we're sort of stuck in our what we would call N equals one example. We only have one example of life in the galaxy so far, and that's on planet Earth.
And so we have to both use that example and think about like, okay, based on what we know from life on Earth and from our communication on Earth, what kinds of assumptions can we make that seem reasonable about how communication would work for other species in the galaxy? But at the same time, you're totally right. If we make too many assumptions, then we might miss a signal or even receive it but not recognize it as a communication. This is challenging, right?
And one of the things that we do to try to get around this is to work with scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, because they tend to be more aware and able to inform us through their research on what kinds of biases humans have traditionally had about life and about technology. We work with animal communications experts as well, thinking about other ways of communicating that we see on the surface of our planet.
And by engaging with these other interdisciplinary scholars, we can sort of get out of our own heads a little bit, at least as scientists and engineers, and try to broaden our ideas of what we might be looking for and make sure that, you know, we're not just trying to find other mathematicians out there in the galaxy. Yeah.
Does it get frustrating to go through all of these things and then perhaps not find something? You know, I'm picturing you a bit like a detective who gets like a thousand leads on a cold case and pursues all of them and none of them lead to the killer. So is it ever like, oh, I just want to find something or is the search itself the reward? For me, every time we don't find something,
I still will publish a paper and I'll say, we looked here, we looked at these stars with these methods for these kinds of signals, and we didn't find anything. And that is more than we knew before this work had been done. And that means this little tiny corner of parameter space, this little part of the checklist has been checked off now. And it's going to take many careers, maybe even many lifetimes of scientists to kind of do enough of that work
to say, you know, once and for all, whether there's any life out there in the galaxy. And so it feels like contributing maybe just a little bit at a time, but to this much bigger project. And I find that satisfying, you know, even if I don't find aliens. Yeah. Sophia Shaikh is an astrobiologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the SETI Institute in California.
You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Also, subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch with us and to find out what's happening on the show. Every week, I'm going to send you a recap of favorite moments from the latest episode, an exclusive preview of what's ahead, and a little bit of a recap of what's coming next.
And there will be ways to participate in upcoming episodes. To sign up, go to whyy.org slash The Pulse newsletter. Coming up, can plants communicate with us through music? You know, it really depends on the moment and how they're really feeling. That's next on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about breaking down the communication barrier between humans and other species.
One way we've tried to bridge this gap is through music, like at an unusual concert that took place in Paris in 1798.
And instead of playing to an audience of humans, the orchestra played to an audience of elephants who had recently been captured from what was then Ceylon, a British colony in South Asia. That's researcher and Princeton University professor of music Gavin Steingow again. His new book is called Interspecies Communication.
The orchestra played works by Haydn and Rousseau for the elephants. Yeah, they wanted to show that European music could have kind of civilizing effects, even on non-humans. The elephants responded to the music by moving around, swaying their trunks or making low grumbles. At the time, people thought it was a successful event.
But what one sees in that context by reading the accounts is that people, again, read all kinds of fanciful things into the movements of the elephants. We can be pretty sure today that although elephants are very sensitive to sound in quite exquisite ways, they were not responding to the grandeurs of European classical music at all. And any notion that the elephants could be civilized by this music is, I think, pretty absurd.
But it paints a picture of, you know, it helps us bring in so many of the ideas of the book, which is to say the political and social work that music does. Our ideas about what our capacity to break through the human-animal barrier is.
And those ideas are still around. There are entire music collections just for pets to calm down anxious cats or to entertain bored dogs.
And this goes the other way, too. We often think of sounds animals make as music, as if they were communicating with us in a way we can understand. So, for example, think about our ways of understanding birds. We don't say that they talk, but we say that they sing.
So there's something talk-like or speech-like about what birds do, but that thing is not speech, therefore we call it singing or we call it music. So music is this figure or this tone that often enters the discussion when we want to say it's something like talking, it's something like speech. We know something's going on, we don't know what it is,
but we'll say that it's music. And yes, music has had that function for a long time as this language-like system, but that is more fluid and a little bit less rigid, and therefore can create this kind of connective tissue between humans and animals.
But Gavin says we have to be careful not to put a human lens on the sounds we're hearing or to attribute emotions and motivations to them and to think about what we call music or song, because again, that's a human framework. So keep all of that in mind as we listen to our next story. The piano notes you're hearing are not coming from a musician. This sound is created by a sequoia tree sapling.
The guitar chords are played by Tom Wall. He is a musician from West Michigan. He is using a plant music machine to make this unusual collaboration happen. It's a device that claims to harness the electricity in plants and to turn it into musical notes. Tom thinks the plants are talking to him through the music.
But is that really possible? Reporter Michael Livingston explored that question originally for the Points North podcast. Tom Wall and I meet up in a small town in northern Michigan called Copemish. It's awesome to be here. Good to meet you, finally. Absolutely, man. I'm glad it worked out. We're at a place called the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. It's essentially a tree library. It's filled with saplings propagated from some of the world's most ancient trees.
Tom looks like a rock star. He's tall with a patchy beard, wearing a long black trench coat and what looks like a hand-knit beanie. He smells like weed and essential oils.
So we have a little cubby hole that's not wet back here, so that's what we're going to run into, okay? He already has his rig set up between rows of baby sequoias. It's just this little device. It's about the size of your cell phone. You can access 128 different noises on it, so like piano or piano.
percussion or it's like a keyboard you know like they have different patches you can put in there so you are giving the plants the instruments to you yes and what so if we attach the the one of the root the one of the leaf and then we turn it on and it will start playing music the device comes from the italian company music of the plants it costs around 400 bucks
And as plants grow, electricity is moving through them, just like any living thing. When the probes are attached to the roots and leaves, the company claims it's capturing those electric impulses.
Tom has some creative control, but he can't actually force the trees to play. He says they need to make that decision. It really just depends on the day and the time with the trees and the plants. Sometimes they play amazingly well. Sometimes they don't want to play at all. These trees really do respond to what's going on.
And I can't stress that enough. Like they're really picking up on some vibrations that are going on around here. So what are you expecting? Today we've had some rain. It's kind of cloudy outside. We're inside right now. Is any of that going to affect how this sounds? I think that just like a person,
You know, it really depends on the moment and how they're really feeling. I think it's just, I think it's going to be a little bit laid back today. It doesn't seem like it's going to be one of those days where it's so overexcited that it's hard to listen to. Because sometimes you play so many notes, you're just like, wow, it's like listening to the hyper jazz or something. You know, and you're like, ah, that's a bit too much for me. Now, Tom begins his demonstration. All right. Y'all ready for this? Yeah. He hits a button on the small box. Then a few notes fall out of the speaker. But then...
Silence, almost as if it's shy to play for a stranger. That's when Tom reaches out a hand and holds a branch in his palm. It seems to like you. He doesn't know you, but you're right. We've got a relationship because we've been playing music together before. But with you, it might not know so much, and it spooks him a little bit. So you just never know how they're going to respond. ♪
I'll admit, in that moment it really did feel like the sequoia tree showed real emotion. When Tom held its branch, it seemed to feel more comfortable, like a parent holding their child's hand. That's the whole point, is just to show us that we are nature itself and those trees are no different than us and we're all one. So we've got to take care of it. Tom thinks the tree tried to speak to him in that moment, or at least feel his energy in some way.
I don't know. I still have questions. How much of what we're hearing is actually coming from the plant or the device or Tom? After all, he can pick the instrument and set the key the plant plays in. Both are super important to conveying any sort of emotion in the music. Tom will be the first to say he's an artist, not a scientist. Even still, are the plants actually communicating through the song?
Frank Taluski is a plant biology professor and former director of Michigan State University's Botanical Gardens and Arboretum. His colleagues know him by another name. You have gotten the nickname the Lorax. What's the story behind that?
You've done your homework. Basically, I love trees. I mean, I've always loved trees as long as I can remember, as a kid growing up in Fort Lee, New Jersey. And I've actually been able to save a lot of trees from removal on campus during construction. And so that's sort of gotten me the name The Lorax. Frank has heard plant music before, and true to his nickname, he believes there is more to plants than we understand.
I played him a bit of Tom's music with the sequoia. Well, I think there's a lot to be learned from it. I think that just to step back and think about the piece of music, just taking advantage of those signals that we may not understand and be able to interpret yet and create something of beauty out of it is kind of a neat, unique human thing, I think, to do. On the microscopic level, Frank says Tom's machine is more like a heart monitor. Beep, beep, beep.
beep. That's the heart monitor programmed to generate a tone every time the electrical impulse triggers the heartbeat. A steady rhythm conveys we're healthy or at least stable. Electricity flows through all living beings. Those impulses are what help us do literally anything in our bodies. In humans, electricity moves around in our nerve cells.
But in plants, it flows freely through the cell wall. It's how living organisms can communicate within a multicellular body, a multicellular organism. That free movement is what makes the unpredictable rhythm of plant music instead of the steady beat of the heart monitor. So yes, in a way, the music is coming from the plants. But even the Lorax would admit, saying plants are sentient, meaning they know what messages they're communicating with the music,
That's a huge stretch. It would be hard to have creativity again without some level of sentience and to have a sentient plant beyond the science fiction of Groot. Is it impossible? I won't say it's impossible. Is it a long, long way away or is it someplace on another planet in the galaxy far, far away? Maybe.
Other researchers, like Mia Howard, are less optimistic. She studies ecology and evolutionary biology at University of Michigan. I played her a bit of plant music too, but unlike Frank, this was her first time hearing anything like this. Um, I don't know, I've never heard a plant make noises like that before.
Mia's research focuses on how plants defend themselves from predators in their ecosystems. She says there are risks that come with personifying plants too much, and that can happen a lot, skewing scientific findings. There's definitely information there that we could take something from, but I don't think we're the intended audience for these signals. But I think these plants are probably just...
just living and just having their water move through them and responding to stresses and not necessarily making music for the reasons that humans make music. But Mia says plants do communicate, just not in ways we can hear.
Plants send out chemical signals that are noticed by other species. They can protect themselves with these signals or even warn others of danger. Their metabolism changes a lot when they're under stress. And a lot of times these chemicals in their metabolism can get released into the air. It's exciting to think about plants speaking in secret languages, chemical or electronic. And I think it's good to talk to your plants. Do you talk to your plants?
Yeah, sometimes. And I think, yeah, it's a good thing to talk to your plant. They might not hear you, but if anything, you're adding more carbon dioxide to their environment and they like that.
But it's important to remember plants are very different from us. There's a danger in reading too much into it and thinking that these plants are trying to communicate with us when these plants might just be expressing their physiological state. So back to the big question. Can plants speak to us through music?
These scientists say, probably not. Even if Tom's device is detecting the sequoias vitals, the plant is likely unaware it's creating a song. But does any of it really matter? This machine has only made Tom more curious about the natural world, and he wants others to be curious too. Thousands of people have watched videos of Tom jamming with the plants on his YouTube channel, like this one where he's playing with cannabis plants.
Change to seeing plants more as living things rather than inanimate objects. And he says that came from the music.
And that's something our scientists are on board with. If plant music gives someone a new appreciation for the importance of plants, then that's all that really matters. That was reporter Michael Livingston. This story was originally heard on Points North from Interlochen Public Media, a podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. We'll link to it on our website.
That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening. ♪
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