Masterplants Orchestra has performed more than 80 concerts on five continents — and the lead performers are alive, rooted, and completely unrehearsed.
PLANT MUSIC
The Night the Plants Led
Imagine walking into a concert hall and discovering that the performers on stage are plants.
Not a metaphor. Not a multimedia installation where plant imagery is projected on a screen. Up to eight living plants — ferns, philodendrons, orchids, whatever is available and thriving — each connected to a device that reads their bioelectrical signals and translates them into music in real time. Human musicians sit among them, listen, and improvise in response.
The plants lead. The humans follow.
Every concert is different because every plant is different — and every plant is different every day.
This is what Masterplants Orchestra does. And since 2018, they have performed more than 80 concerts across the United States, India, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Africa — from the International Plant Music Festival in Paris to the Hippocrates Wellness Center in Florida, with no two performances sounding alike.
The Founders
Masterplants Orchestra was founded in 2018 by Tritone Crisantemo, Benjamin Jamily, and Zigola Pioppo — three artists with a singular, ambitious goal: to develop a way for the botanical world to speak through sound.
Tritone is the driving force of the project. A musician, sound designer, and researcher, he has spent years merging his background in sound design with a deep love for the natural world. His approach is rooted in a simple but radical premise — that plants are not passive decoration but active participants, capable of shaping music when given the tools to do so.
Where early plant music was intimate and contemplative — a single plant, a single listener — Masterplants Orchestra is symphonic. At their largest performances, up to eight plants play simultaneously through a multi-speaker system, their individual electrical signals woven together into what unmistakably sounds like an ensemble.
The Symphony 2.0 System
The system that makes this possible is called Symphony 2.0 — a proprietary multi-plant interface co-developed by the Masterplants founders. It is designed specifically for the demands of live concert performance: handling multiple plant signals simultaneously, routing them through professional synthesizers and modular systems, and producing the kind of audio quality that holds up on a festival stage.
The underlying science is the same across all plant music devices. Sensors detect micro-voltage fluctuations in the plant’s tissues — driven by photosynthesis, water movement, and the plant’s continuous response to its environment — and convert those fluctuations into real-time MIDI data. But at the scale Masterplants Orchestra operates, that data becomes something more than ambient sound. It becomes a performance.
We take bio-sonification to an unprecedented level — producing full-scale plant concerts that feature up to eight plants performing simultaneously.
The performances often evolve into a collaborative dialogue with human musicians, giving birth to what the orchestra calls Interspecies Music — a live, non-hierarchical exchange between plant intelligence and human improvisation, neither side in control of where the music goes.
The Music
Masterplants Orchestra’s recorded work has grown alongside their live performances. Three modern albums showcase the evolution of their symphonic work:
Live at the Open Temple (2023) — an immersive interspecies concert recorded at Damanhur in northern Italy, featuring Sacred Dancer Quaglia, Poetess Madoqua, and Masterplants co-founder Zigola Pioppo.
We Are the Children of Life (2024) — a collaborative single featuring the ethereal vocals of Olivia Ahltorp, where human melody and plant bio-sonification merge into a single unified anthem. Built on the 8-channel Symphony system, it serves as a sonic reminder of our intrinsic connection to the natural world.
Secret Garden — their latest work, offered entirely for free as a gift to the plant music community. The album was recorded using the orchestra’s custom, open-source Symphony and BECA interfaces, showcasing the power of multi-plant polyphony. Atmospheric, high-fidelity, and designed for daily listening.
Alongside this modern catalog sits a set of legacy recordings — early experiments that laid the groundwork for the orchestra itself. Interspecies Music (2018), made on the legendary U1 device from Damanhur, captures the project’s humble beginnings. Atlantis, recorded live on a 2018 tour in Spain, features vocalist Chiyo Kaiga, flutist Benjamin Hedengran, and live sound designer Kenneth Lorentzen. Songs from the Sacred Woods explores a Damanhurian myth about the sacred forest temple Etulte — six songs about the alliance between humans and trees.
Taken together, the discography is a record of an art form coming into its own.
About Tritone Crisantemo and the Masterplants Orchestra
Tritone Crisantemo is a plant music artist, sound designer, and the driving force behind the Masterplants Orchestra — a pioneering interspecies ensemble that has performed more than 80 concerts across the US, Europe, India, Canada, Mexico, and Africa since 2018.
Their latest album, Secret Garden, is available as a free download — a gift to the plant music community.
Stream the full journey on the Masterplants Orchestra YouTube channel.
Download high-fidelity lossless versions on Bandcamp to support their ongoing open-source research and global tours.
Explore upcoming concerts, recordings, and booking information at masterplants.net. Tritone is currently booking collaborations and performances for late 2026 and 2027.
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_fR-Za0i9GV_o6xQCf2fQw
Bandcamp: [John to confirm exact URL from masterplants.net]
masterplants.net: https://www.masterplants.net