How it came to us

In 2014, my wife Jennifer traveled to a community in northern Italy called Damanhur, with her mentor Dr. Jean Houston — a pioneer of the human potential movement. While she was there, the community was unveiling the first commercial version of something they’d been developing for decades: an instrument that reads the bioelectrical signals of a living plant and turns them into sound. They hand-built only six to eight hundred of them. By a quiet bit of synchronicity, Jennifer was there as they presented it. She brought one home — and it’s the same device still playing in our house today.

It goes back further than you’d think

The work behind that instrument didn’t begin in 2014. The first experiments exploring plant intelligence date back to 1975 — long before plant music reached any wider audience. The first device with a built-in synthesizer came in 1999, and the hand-built U1 we still own arrived in 2014. That patient, decades-long history is a big part of why these feel less like a gadget and more like an instrument.

A long way around

My own road here wasn’t a straight one. For most of my career I worked in environmental cleanup — hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste. Jennifer and I built that company together and sold it a few years before any of this began. It’s a fair distance from there to sitting quietly with a plant, listening to what it has to play. I wouldn’t trade the trip.

Why PlantSonics

We eventually moved to Italy for a few years to go deeper into the community, its research, and its teachings, where Jennifer took her Damanhurian name, Shoco. The more I learned, the more I wanted other people to experience this for themselves — not as a novelty, but as a direct, everyday way to connect with the plant world and receive the benefits of listening to plant music. When we returned to the United States, I started PlantSonics to be a proper home for these instruments here: easy to own, with nothing standing between you and the plant.

A house full of plant music

This stopped being a curiosity a long time ago and became part of how we live. My plants play for me about twelve hours a day — from the moment I get up to when I say good night — and there are few things more soothing than music made by a plant running quietly in the background of your day, whether you’re at home, in the office, or out in the garden.

And it isn’t only me. Plant music runs through the whole household. Shoco brings it into the meditations and meta journeys she leads — the plants set a tone no recorded track quite matches — and visitors almost always ask what they’re hearing. It’s simply part of how our home feels now.