Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing) is a container for my work exploring the biological basis for music that I embarked on around five years ago: centered specifically around plant and fungi biosonification.
Plants Can Dance is an event series, workshop, talk, a compilation of recordings, a live stream, an app, and a brand with t-shirts and merch available.
The Plants Can Dance mission is to connect the natural world with the electronic world, using the electricity that exists all around us to make music that helps us tune in, listen deeply and form a richer bond with the natural world.
Plants Can Dance
I debuted Plants Can Dance on the popular YouTube channel My Analog Journal in Jan 2025.
The stream combined a mix of my treasured ambient, new age and 4th world vinyl records with plant biosonification from the plants around the studio.
OmVed Gardens 13th June, 2025
Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing) is a new concept from award-winning sound artist and DJ Brian d'Souza aka Auntie Flo. During this unique live performance, we'll discover a new way of listening to the plants at OmVed, using their electrical impulses to create live biodata that trigger notes on a specially built modular synthesizer. This process, known as 'bionsonification', is a novel way of tuning into the natural world using sound, immersing the audience in a living, breathing, acoustic ecology.
Featuring guest Dr Helen Anahita Wilson
The natural world can often be out of reach. For 80% (6.2 billion of us) that live in urban areas, we’re surrounded by concrete, limiting our access to nature under our feet. For the past 100 years, we’ve filled our skies with air traffic and industrial noise that has significantly distorted our soundscape.
I’ve lived in cities my whole life and inner-London for the past 15 years. During the Covid lockdowns, I started to crave a closer connection to the natural world and five years ago actively sought ways that could help me do that.
I started getting out and recording nature in the parks around where I live, using microphones and recording equipment as a means of plugging in to the natural world’s interface: the better the equipment I used, the more layers of sound were unveiled, the density of information provided by the natural world revealed and the better listener I became.
I started Ambient Flo radio as a means of combining ambient music (in its broadest sense) and the sounds of nature. Listeners could blend field recordings I and others had made with ambient music to achieve their perfect blend of human music and nature’s own music. Every month, I worked with a guest curator who shared their knowledge and music based on nature connection and transcendence.
I entered the world of biosonification which allowed me to listen to nature's internal rhythm - analysing electrical biodata and converting it into sound information that in turn can be subtly manipulated and heard as a type of generative music.
Biosonification reveals that all plants and fungi are unique. They communicate in a language that is unique and operate on a completely different time frame than humans. I found that I needed to adjust the ways in which I listen to be able to hear what a plant is saying. Patience is the key.
Plants are dancing - literally - they are moving, swaying, connecting in harmony just like humans on a dance floor but operating on their own time, mostly imperceptible to the naked eye.
Mushrooms Sing - fungi are continuously connecting with the world around them, collaborating and exchanging information. As some of the oldest species living on the planet today, they have a knowledge base that extends back millenia. They sing to each other using their mycelia, exchanging the information that helps them to survive and thrive.