India, June 6 -- For most musicians, a sound-check before a concert means making sure your instruments sound good. But for Tarun Nayar, the process is a little different. Electrodes are rigged up to banyan tree leaves, clipped to the petals of iris flowers, plugged into oyster mushrooms or whatever he's picked as his instruments that day.

Plants have long inspired painting and poetry, but with Nayar, they show off their composing skills too. The electrodes record changes in a plant's electrical activity and convert them into MIDI data. So far, so geeky. But Nayar has assigned different musical values - notes, beats, pitches - to each data point, so the feed can be viewed as a piece of music, in real time. The sounds come out as beeps and...