1 of 2
Photo by Thomas Crone
Duane Bridges
2 of 2
As a half hour conversation about his music stretches just past the hour mark, Duane Bridges checks the time and smiles, knowing that on one, recent topic of interest, he “can talk for days.” A musician and music educator, Bridges has tapped into a project that he may explore for a while to come, leaving open the possibility that an unusual, mid-career discovery could either be a phase, or… it could be the beginning of a very real, open-ended period of creation.
The shortest possible version of this: Bridges makes music with plants.
HIs Bandcamp page has examples of his technique; the latest work, from April, is Volume Two (Four Plantasias For Plant and E-Bowed Guitar). It’s described like so: “Four Plantasias features four duets for Plant and E-Bowed Electric Guitar. A Lucky Bamboo Plant was used as a MIDI controller via the MIDI Sprout device. MIDI note information was then translated into electronic sounds. A human being (the composer) was used to play the E-Bowed Electric Guitar. Together, unique sound sculptures were created through human-plant interaction.”
We meet at the Old Orchard location of Starbuck’s, which is close to his residence, as well as at the two schools where he teaches: Nerinx Hall, where he serves as a music teacher; and neighboring Webster University, where he’s an adjunct in the same field. It’s also close to Shrewsbury’s new Wal-Mart, where Bridges frequently walks through the garden center, musing about plants and how they’d sound.
As we talk, Bridges’ enthusiasm is contagious and he frequently references the MIDI Sprout sitting in a small shipping box on the table, breaking down the components inside when asked for a look at the guts of it. More amusingly, there’s a large photo of a coffee bush hanging on the wall next to us and it’s a great prop for him to show how he attaches sensors to his plants; to date, he’s recorded with three different plants, including the lucky bamboo of Four Plantasias.
“What you discover is very interesting,” he says. “The plant is alive. That sounds kind of funny to say. You don’t normally think about this; at least I didn’t. You hear things like ‘you should talk to your plants, be nice to your plants.’ But when you hook this [Sprout] up, get all the software running, you really do discern that the plant is alive.”
Bridges has experimented with all types of environmental factors and has found that his plants, when hooked up to the MIDI Sprout, will react to various stimuli in their room’s environment. At times, he’ll leave the sensors on for long periods and notices subtle changes in the bio-feedback that the plants emit. They occur when the air conditioning kicks on, when the lights are turned on/off, when there are other sounds happening in the room. So: the plants sense the room’s vibe and their bio-feedback indicates as much.
Conversationally, he tries different ways to convey what’s happening in such moments and uses the analogy of medical doctor with a stethoscope for one explanation, a CT scan for another.
“I can watch the plant give back information,” he says. “It’s a heartbeat, in a sense.”
He says that in recording mode, he allows for the bio-feedback to trigger different informational options. The plant itself, through the bio-feedback, is giving the MIDI Sprout raw materials, which are then manipulated by Bridges, or played along to, like the e-bowed guitar on Four Plantasias. While most of that sound manipulation is taking place in the world of software on his laptop, he’s found that he can also actively stimulate changes in the bio-feedback by subtle, physical, tactile acts; say, pinching a leaf, which will cause a change in tones.
These kind of moments inevitably cause him a bit of pause.
“It could lead to a crazy hypothesis,” he says. “If a plant can respond to all of these things, if it’s alive in such a way, can the plant become poetic in some way? That’s far out, right? But if a plant can communicate, how musical can a plant be? These are inevitably the bigger questions that you have to ask as you plug it in. You start to feel like Frankenstein! ‘It’s alive!’ That’s really pretty cool. and in those discoveries, that’s where the fun is at.
“It’s thought-provoking from a musical perspective,” he says. “You wonder: can I make music with a living thing that’s not a human being? Is music strictly in the realm of human interaction? The Plantasias are duets. I hook them up, saw the notes that were being played. The notes I was seeing were analogous to written music. Like a jazz player, who may look at a lead sheet and improvise off of that basis. Those notes enabled me to duet with a plant, with the plant having the lead. It’s a strange concept, thinking of whether you can collaborate with a living entity that’s not a human being.”
It Starts with a Machine...
In some respects, these heavy thoughts came from a fluky beginning. Bridges had heard of the MIDI Sprout, created by a boutique pedal-maker, Data Garden. After some research, he looked into a purchase, but had to wait for the next round of MIDI Sprouts to come out of production; they’re only made a batch at a time, like a fine whiskey, and when they’re out, they’re out.
As he handles the MIDI Sprout, it’s amazing how light and simple the unit appears; though it’s anything but simple, of course. Three AA batteries sit below a motherboard, wrapped inside a simple, cardboard box, with the magic in that motherboard. The piece is light in the palm of your hand, a few ounces of technical brilliance, which connects to a pair of electrodes, looking not unlike the type of sensors you’d use to send pulses through a physical therapy machine for your sore knee or elbow.
When those sensors are hooked up to a plant, anything’s possible.
“I can flip on the lights and the plant will freak out,” Bridges says. “It reacts when you water it. When the air comes on, it’ll chill out. This device takes all that information, the life pulse of the plant, and makes musical information for what I then use. It’s making notes.”
While the MIDI Sprout’s been a mainstay in his home recording rig for a couple of months now, Bridges was finally able to take it out into a live setting.
As a member of the band Shed Shot in the early 2000s, Bridges came into the orbit of a lot of experimental musicians and one of those was Galen Gondolfi, the innovative driver of the DIY arts district at Cherokee and Compton. He played several shows at that zone’s Radio Cherokee and knew Gondolfi’s new work across the river, inside the Granite City Arts & Design District. Recently, at a multi-media, multi-venue event inside G-CADD, Bridges set up his MIDI Sprout and brought a batch of plants with him, one to rotate in at the top of each hour.
“Galen’s a great guy,” Bridges says. “And what I like is that he gives you free rein to do crazy stuff. It was fun to be able to be there, it felt like a happy, family reunion, making this music out of the back of a bread truck.”
It was a mellow first outing, for the most part, though he did find one attendee who was insisting that the sounds created were due to wind, not the bio-feedback of the plants. In a sense, that dubious visitor was a canary in a coalmine; as Bridges begins to test out the Sprout in live settings, he’ll surely find more people that have questions, comments, maybe even something like mild annoyance when confronted with what he’s doing.
As someone with his own deep roots in experimental and ambient music, he knows that he’s not creating melodic work, per se. He says that he, himself, can get lost in the tones, the sounds of the MIDI Sprout when it’s hooked up at home. And the creations that he’s put out hint at sounds that can soothe or agitate, as your own wants/needs. As he speaks, he references folks that you might expect in such a conversation: John Cage, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, his touchstones.
Simplifying the process, he says that “I’m using faders on a mixing board, creating soundscapes with the eight sounds that the bio-feedback sets off. It’s a challenge to explain if the person hasn’t done much recording and it’s a stretch for some people to grasp, I get it. These are not your standard melodies and rhythms. It’s all very ambient.
“This is all new to me,” he adds. “I got this [Sprout] in February or March, right away after reading about on Twitter or somewhere. Instantly, I knew that it’s something I could use and be creative with. It’s also enabled me to work pretty quickly.”
It Also Starts With a Plant…
It doesn’t even take the question being asked: Bridges volunteers that he wasn’t “a plant person.” If anything, his apartments over the years have featured no plants.
“Eh, there are all these benefits to plants,” he says. “They purify the air. There are all kinds of good reasons to keep plants. I’m a convert. A crazy thing, with the genesis of this project, is that it’s made me more empathetic to to plants. I’ve come to be more respectful of plants as a living thing.”
It’s joked that Bridges might be seeing the early stages of a takeover: the man who hated plants eventually becoming so obsessed by them that his world is filled with nothing but them, his home engulfed by green. He laughs, but knows that impression is an option; he’s had the thought himself. At the Wal-Mart garden center these days, he carefully walks through, eyeballing plants, then running a quick phone check to see if the plants will, or won’t, be compatible with this cat. Frequently, they’re not and they stay on the shelf. Other times, they are, and then he begins to look at the plant more seriously.
“I have smaller plants and bigger plants,” he says. “The lucky bamboo? I kinda like that one. It’s middle-of-the-road, in the sense that it’s a leaner plant; it’s not chaotic and I don’t have to battle it. I’ve also bought majesty palms that are as tall as I am and hooking sensors up to those, well, it’s a whole new ballgame. But the the lucky bamboo’s one I like, so,” when it comes to recording, “I’ve been rolling with that one.”
He adds that another “weird byproduct of this whole experiment is that everywhere I go now, I’m scoping out the plant life. I’m thinking of what it might sound like. It’s really bizarre, to tell you the truth. I’m not a scientist. Not to sound high-falutin’, but I’m more of an artist than anything else. So I'm always thinking of how to use these plants more creatively.
“What’s challenging for me, curatively speaking, is what to do next,” he adds. “Like, I’ve used e-bowed electric guitar now. There may come a break time, where I don’t use it, as it can only do so much. The X-factor is accounting for all of the living plants. There’s X-amount of living plants! In theory, there’s an infinite amount of possible sounds.” A pause. “There’s probably not. There’s probably a finite amount. But I don’t want to think so. I haven’t met that brick wall yet.”
At different points in our hour, he varies from one theory to another, bouncing through different analogies that’ll help make his process clear, dropping in delightful phrases like “... and then the plant was playing tubular bells.” He repeatedly pokes at the wall-hanging to demonstrate ideas and thumbs apart the Sprout, dissecting the roles of various cords and cables, his hands in constant motion. He talks about ideas to consider, from hooking up two plants, or bouncing the music created by plants into the space of other plants, and when he brings up the names of Satie and Cage, he mentions the want to “drop a little music history bomb” on things. There’s so much here.
It’s fascinating. And unique. But is he the only one out there with this approach?
He knows that there was a small “plant music” movement in the 1970s, with a few albums resulting from that time. But those were analog days, with the remnants of that time scattered through thrift shops and odd corners of the web.
Today? A very interesting niche in music creation, one that Bridges notes “is not entirely new,” is bubbling up again, 40 years after a brief heyday. As example: right now, on a device near you, a live stream of a snake plant is happening.
“The kind of music derived from plants is not the typical, usual stuff,” he suggests. “You may have to be open to the more experimental side of things. There’s a chin-scratching-ness to it that, to me, is win-win. There you have it.”
