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What is ‘sentience’? When a person or animal is injured they react by experiencing pain, marshalling the body’s defense systems to repair the damage and begin the process of recovery. The question, surely, is whether we know enough about sentience to be quite certain that plant life does not have it.
 
Every ecologist out there, and even amateur gardeners, have been known to swear that plants, too, ‘feel’ things, but it is only recent research that has demonstrated just how ‘intelligent’ they really are. Plant life has a heritage far older than mankind, and in some respects, it makes we humans seem inadequate! Is it not about time to take more notice?

Developments in nanotechnology and planetary-scale engineering point to new possibilities for us to conform the global environment to our needs. These advances combined with a dream to make clouds snow ice cream have inspired a series of experiments that look at ways to alter the composition of clouds to make new and delicious sensory experiences. Using ice-cream as a catalyst for interesting dialogue, the project’s focus is to welcome people into a mobile space that sits outside institutions, letting new audiences experience and imagine emerging scientific developments and their consequences.

I always liked bonsai trees, and I was curious to try the approach I used for "Music from a Tree" on a smaller scale, so I bought a bonsai and recorded this little experimental piece.

To determine the key I used the lowest note I could play and recorded the rest around it. Besides playing the leaves, I used bows of different sizes, a piano hammer and a paint brush.

As far as microphones I used my Røde NT6, a customized stethoscope and tiny MEAS piezo transducers.

Our interest is to use acoustic sounds, specific only to each species, that make beetles uncomfortable and not want to be in that environment.
— NAU Forest Entomology Professor Dr. Richard Hofstetter.