India, June 7 -- 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 bloops, the stream of feedback collecting creating an ambient soundscape. "Any spike in activity between the electrodes - due to photosynthesis, or shifts in metabolic activity - is picked up by the synthesizer," he says. The more the metabolic activity in the plant, the more electrical activity it generates. Even when plucked, plants and fungi remain electrically active for hours, sometimes weeks - making it possible to draw, say, a ballad from a bouquet. "So, the plants are not 'making music', we're making music with plants." It's a collab we humans didn't know we needed. Nayar likens it to heartbeat of the organism. So, what's it like to press your ear up against a forest? Canada-born Nayar, who lives in Vancouver, found his calling by sheer luck. In 2020, he and his friend, Ruby Singh, were messing around with synthesizers, trying to figure out what different types of flowers, trees, and shrubs sounded like. "I plugged it up to a salmonberry bush and I was blown away," he recalls. "I remember thinking that I'm going to be spending the next ten years of my life doing this." His two passions had unexpectedly fused. He trained as a biologist and in Indian classical music. He was also part of a pop band, Delhi 2 Dublin, and was already tinkering around with synthesizer kits, to produce exactly the kinds of sounds he imagined in his head. The salmonberry experiment filled the gap like a well-placed chord. He set up Modern Biology (@ModernBiology101), his plant-music platform in 2021 to showcase his experiments with nature. Bio-sonification is a niche and nerdy world, Nayar says. Think of it as someone randomly tapping out a rhythm on a keyboard or plucking an electric guitar - no process, just vibes. Mushrooms sound wonky and squiggly; Himalayan maples hit the ear as funky and magnetic; sunflowers have a peppy, effervescent feel. No two buds or leaves sound the same, but they all sound alive. And, don't expect verses, a chorus or even a beat. Like a fungal network or root system, the music does its own thing, and Nayar imposes no external order. "You don't have to pay attention to any one part of the song. You can just zone out and let the rhythms form a background track in your mind." Nayar's studio is often a forest or a meadow. He goes hiking or scouts local parks for a new open-air concert venue, or for fungi that can become the base of his next soundtrack. "I always like to plug into trees or plants that are indigenous to the region, because they capture the sound of the environment best." Each environment yields a different musical composition. For his 2023 album, Field Notes, one of four he's released, Nayar spent two years in the wild, creating soundscapes of dahlias, swordferns and Japanese maples at different times of the day. At one concert in Bornem, Brussels, in a forest, he asked his audience to collect fallen leaves, fungi, flowers, barks of the surrounding silver beech trees. Then, he "composed" a soundscape of the environment. "There were about a hundred people, each plugged into their headphones, and we were all listening to what we created together," he recalls. "The realisation that the world around us is alive kind of shocks everyone." Nayar has played his plant-based concerts in parks, botanical gardens, even restaurants. Some bits have shown up on Diljit Dosanjh's 2021 album Moonchild Era. He's just back from a 10-city tour of Europe, for which he produced music from a variety of shrooms - oyster, reishi, black pearl king trumpet. The gigs were held at churches and included scientific talk and poetry performances. At some, the mushroom soundtracks were accompanied by live flute and harp music. "People were all so curious to know what mushrooms sound like," he says. "No two mushrooms sound the same. But they all sound so funky." More and more young people are listening in, and are interested in connecting with nature through music. "We're in an era of heightened climate awareness," he says. Plant music is one way of preserving an ecosystem. "There's so much acoustic diversity in every square inch of ground. When you destroy the environment, you destroy a library of relationships - between plants and their surroundings, and between us and nature. I hope bioelectric music reminds us of how interconnected we are."...