Hey location scout: are those potted plants are too noisy?

[Jay Rose]

According to an article in New Scientist, ordinary plants make audible* sounds when stressed:

 

Quote

Microphones placed 10 centimetres from the plants picked up sounds in the ultrasonic range of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which the team says insects and some mammals would be capable of hearing and responding to from as far as 5 metres away. A moth may decide against laying eggs on a plant that sounds water-stressed, the researchers suggest. Plants could even hear that other plants are short of water and react accordingly, they speculate.

 

(* - Well, audible by dogs and teenagers. Or by 96 kHz files with good mics. Or possibly beating with other sounds up there. At least, they're sounds and apparently reasonably loud.)

 

In the article,

drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour... when plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour... unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour...

 

The implications for farmers and gardeners are obvious. For our productions... well, at least it's another source for stuff that can be manipulated in post.

 

[Constantin]

Yeah, just happened to read an article about that, too. 
I find it very interesting. And I remain somewhat puzzled how plants do that. And I am intrigued enough to try this at home. 
Just no sure yet which mic I‘ll use...

 

btw, Jay you‘d need 192k files to be able to sample most of those sounds..

[Jay Rose]

3 hours ago, Constantin said:

...Jay you‘d need 192k files to be able to sample most of those sounds...

 

Assuming they're logarithmic, like the sounds we can normally hear, most of the separately distinguishable tomato sounds would be in the bottom end of that 20k - 100k range. Just like the acoustic middle of our 20Hz - 20kHz range is considered to be 1k... or why middle C on the piano is ~261 Hz, not 10 kHz. 

 

So I'm guessing that if we had a need to record veggie dialog in a production, we could get a lot of it with 96 k s/r. [At worst, the top end of fruit fricatives might suffer. But there is no truth to the rumor that Spanish onions have a lisp.] 

 

The golden ear, or golden thumb, types may certainly disagree.

[Bouke]

Keep me in the loop.
I'm good at data analysis.
Now, it's up to you to decide on a good mic.
Pick one, I'll buy one.
(And some plants to torture.)
 

 Bouke

[Mike Westgate]

Try shooting on a tropical island covered in palm trees for 7 weeks!

Everything is covered in noise night and day .

 

Mike

[LarryF]

On 12/7/2019 at 12:28 PM, Jay Rose said:

According to an article in New Scientist, ordinary plants make audible* sounds when stressed:

 

 

(* - Well, audible by dogs and teenagers. Or by 96 kHz files with good mics. Or possibly beating with other sounds up there. At least, they're sounds and apparently reasonably loud.)

 

In the article,

drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour... when plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour... unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour...

 

The implications for farmers and gardeners are obvious. For our productions... well, at least it's another source for stuff that can be manipulated in post.

 

Here comes PETP.

LEF

On 12/7/2019 at 4:53 PM, Jay Rose said:

 

Assuming they're logarithmic, like the sounds we can normally hear, most of the separately distinguishable tomato sounds would be in the bottom end of that 20k - 100k range. Just like the acoustic middle of our 20Hz - 20kHz range is considered to be 1k... or why middle C on the piano is ~261 Hz, not 10 kHz. 

 

So I'm guessing that if we had a need to record veggie dialog in a production, we could get a lot of it with 96 k s/r. [At worst, the top end of fruit fricatives might suffer. But there is no truth to the rumor that Spanish onions have a lisp.] 

 

The golden ear, or golden thumb, types may certainly disagree.

But it is true that Jay has a finely honed sense of humor.

LEF

[borjam]

On 12/8/2019 at 12:53 AM, Jay Rose said:

The golden ear, or golden thumb, types may certainly disagree.

 

Brace for audiophile grade compost and plant pots coming!