Jenny Hu — Looking Outwards 11: Computer Music

For this week’s looking outwards post, I will discuss the artist Mileece, a  sound artist and environmental designer who is known for her methods of making music with plants.

Mileece creates generative music , one track which can be listened to above, and on this link. The way she generates this music is by essentially reading electrical currents given off by  plants via electrodes, and processing the current into binary code— which is then processed and animated into sound. Often, this creates sound that feels like music.

Vice created great documentation of her process at the following video:

What I love about Mileece’s music is the duality of the generative work. In some ways, the music is generated purely from the plant, it’s a radical change in our perception of what a plant is and is capable of, but it’s reprocessed by the computer. The computer is a key part of our ability to interpret the plant as music in the first place. Because of this, it feels impossible to define her music without the discussion of computation.

Will we start to breed plants to generate totally new sounds?