I am just playing Devil's Advocate here, I'm not trying to be mean or offend anyone! 😈 But I feel like I had to say something because I used to believe in the whole music thing.
There have been many experiments to see if plants respond to music. 🎼
If you look for people who say plants
do respond to music, there are only two experiments I can find. One is from a book written in the 80s known as
The Secret Life of Plants. The book claimed that plants grew
worse under rock and roll, but grew
better with classical music. However, their experiment was never confirmed by anyone. The only other example of a "source" is the "Myth Busters" people did an experiment, and they found the plants grew
better under Rock and Roll and
worse with other music. However, they admitted they had such a small sample size, and they had trouble growing the plants at all (they're not gardeners), so it may have just been a coincidence. 🤷
So you have one example saying rock and roll is
bad, and one saying it's
good. Both are experiments by random people who are not scientists, and their results are contradictory. 🌱
On the flip side, it has been
well established by scientists in controlled experiments that plants are
not affected by music. 🎶 Plants respond well to heat (so for example if they're close to a boombox they grew better due to the increased heat), but after temperature was controlled they didn't notice any difference between plants grown with or without music. Another really damning thing about the music theory is no one has any explanation for
how plants would be able to "hear" in the first place, even though we have a pretty good idea how they "see", "smell", "taste", "touch" and otherwise respond to stimuli. 🌿
There's a book recommended on the GWE website called
What a Plant Knows that goes into this. After I read it my mind was
BLOWN about what we've learned about plants in the last decade! Truth is so much stranger than fiction!!! 💥 As one example, plants can actually "smell" and they use it to survive during a bug infestation! Certain plants were able to "smell" that bugs were attacking nearby trees, and then respond to the smell by releasing a natural pesticide that makes leaves taste terrible so bugs leave them alone! 👃
The author is a biologist who teaches plant physiology and genetics at Tel Aviv University, and has done
extensive research and experiments on plants for decades. He takes you through the whole journey of exactly how we've learned what a plant "knows" about its environment, and why it reacts the way it does. The book is really easy to read, with pictures, and stays really simple and entertaining. It's not like a text book or anything, I found myself reading the whole thing in only a few days, I couldn't put it down! ✨
Anyways, in my opinion the dozens of controlled experiments put a nail in the âš° of the idea that music affects how plants grow, at least in any way that scientists are able to measure or replicate. ðŸ“
I hope I don't offend anyone, I just thought people might be interested in what the scientific experiments have shown because I also used to believe in the music theory... 🔬 I highly, highly recommend the book if you want something to leaf through every once in a while!!! 📗 I feel like I learned so much in such a short amount of time!
