Make The Plant Sing

SEE/LISTEN TO VIDEOS BELOW FOR THE FINAL RESULT. (Click on the black rectangles)

Baby Bio is a brand which predominantly makes liquid “Miracle-Gro” houseplant food. Their slogan is “Greatness Grows with every drop” and the liquid is made so that drops are added to the water used to water the plants. For a university assignment the brief was to create an ident, this is the brand I chose to represent.

My goal with the ident was to focus on this idea of promoting growth through hydration and bring forward imagery of luscious green leaves with some drama to reflect the ‘miracle-gro’ idea. My favourite idents personally are those shown at cinemas just before a film, that immerse the audience and make use of the subs, so I also wanted to reach for this style with the project. For a unique selling point/talking point for the ident, I decided to have one of my houseplants (after being fed by Baby Bio of course) “choose” the pitch/scale of the piece and also “create” some of the featured sounds by attaching it to an Arduino board communicating with a max patch.

For the Arduino setup, a wire goes into each plant and the electrical changes within the plant are recorded and sent to the computer. To find out how to bring this idea to life I followed the YouTube video referenced below.

This particular set-up, paired with the provided code, created a two plant sampler, triggering samples within max when the numbers representing the electrical flow within the plants rose above a certain number. To get the numbers to change significantly, you could hold a leaf of the plant, shake the plant, blow air at the plant... It was incredibly interesting to see how the plants were directly responding to human interaction. I noticed at this point that the cactus gave off
much lower resting readings, and less changed ‘disturbed’ readings, maybe due to the fact it is a much slower growing plant used to preserving its energy, because of this I decided to continue with the Peace Lily only. Instead of using the plant as a kind of midi-interface, I wanted to have it ‘sing’ or ‘talk’ (as far as that’s possible), to do this I adapted the max patch so that the numbers from the plant set the frequency and thereby pitch of a sinewave. I recorded this sine wave in max while ‘disturbing’ the plant (after watering it with Baby Bio) and I used the recording to set the pitch of my ident, while also including clips of the recording in the ident. This made sure that underneath, the ident was at all times an authentic representation of the brand.

Targeting consumers, I thought the ident should associate Baby Bio with nature (as opposed to artificial chemicals), hydration and healthy foliage. To associate the brand with nature, I decided to include a field recording of a bird making a noise that had stood out to me at the time. I edited the recording to take away the low frequencies of the wind and generally cleaned it up, adding reverb so it felt like a natural addition to the synthetic sounds it accompanied. To make it more immersive, and more real to the consumer, I positioned the tweets using logic’s binaural panning to sound like birds were tweeting from all around the listener or flying around.

To give a sense of hydration, I chose and crafted soft-synth sounds that reminded me of droplets of water or that had a high resonance which to me sounded ‘hydrated’. I also chose sounds which contained lots of movement as I wanted the piece to be moving and evolving like living things and represent the journey of growth for the plant.

Making an ident, I thought it was very important that the piece worked well alongside a visual advert. To test this, I created two basic adverts, focusing on queue points for when things could change in the advert and making sure that the music contained enough change to match these. I also wanted to test if the music fit alongside visuals of plants and see if it worked to drastically improve the effectiveness of a visual advert. To make the video, I used time-lapse footage of a plant from a YouTube video(ref. below) and edited it together so the speed matched the length of the idents, using changes in speed and colour alongside transitions to show the queue points in the music for accompanying an advert. I felt that this visual side of things was very important in the process of creating the ident; testing the effectiveness of the ident; as an example of the type of visual accompaniment the brand could use while also demonstrating possible que points for an advert of the brand’s choice.

As well as wanting to make the ident memorable for the process used to create it, I wanted to make it memorable to the consumer in a purely musical way. To do this I chose rich sounds that sounded different to the jingles of the TV world and had more depth to them than a simple bass click or bell ring, I wanted to capture the consumers attention with drama and depth. The vocal-synth plucks layering on top of each other provided the focus and glue to the ident, with the synth swells filling it out and the deep sub bass creating a dramatic ending. I wanted to have the ident work well in a cinema with the sub bass and surround sound from the binaural panning. To have a full journey contained within the short time, I used Mini-Meep to create distorted high notes and then drenched them in reverb,
creating a kind of background anchor for the ident. The notes get higher in pitch, reach a plateau, and then finish lower again. I felt this sense of a journey was extremely important to make the ident effective in promoting growth. Mini-Meep fit perfectly to this subtle yet highly relevant task, making the ident feel like it had travelled without making it feel rushed.

See the videos(black rectangles) below for the final result.

References:

Jacobs, S. (2020) Arduino Code. 19 January. Available from: https://bit.ly/3eTEcko [Accessed 20 April 2022]

Jacobs, S. (2020) How to make an Arduino Plant Audio Sampler Tutorial with Max. Capacitive synth using 2 plants. YouTube [video]. 19 January. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msNniH22tzg&list=LL&index=9 [Accessed 20 April 2022]

Jacobs, S. (2020) Max Patch. 19 January. Available from: https://bit.ly/2A7tw2R [Accessed 20 April 2022]

(2018) Studio Time Lapse Test - Plant coming back to life. YouTube [video]. 6 February. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAdkDLGz0M [Accessed 20 April 2022]