Music Will Help Your Weed Grow to Its Full Potential: The Research

Music is a powerful force. It can make us dance, cry, laugh, relax, or pump us up. While we might enjoy music by listening to it with our ears, plants can enjoy music by feeling its vibration. In fact, the right vibrations played intermittently can help plant growth, ultimately improving the quality and quantity of a crop. Just be careful – not every type of music is liked by plants.

Proving Plants React to ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Music

It was the 70’s when Dorothy Retallack conducted experiments on plants involving tones and music at the Colorado Woman’s College of Denver using Biotronic Control Chambers. Her results were as follows:

• Playing a constant tone kills plants.
• Playing a tone sporadically allows plants to thrive more than plants exposed to no tone at all.
• Rock music hinders plant growth.
• Soothing music allowed plants to grow abundantly & remain healthy.
• Plants leaned 15-20 degrees towards the radio playing soothing music.
• Plants react positively to stringed instruments and negatively to percussion.
• North Indian sitar music received the best response from plants.
• Both classical and jazz music received positive responses from plants.

From these experiments, it could be concluded that certain types of vibrations are “liked” by plants, as they will lean towards their source while growing abundantly with good health (involving thicker roots, robust tissues, and quicker flowering rates). Meanwhile, some vibrations are “disliked” by plants, as they will hinder growth leading to death.

However, these amateur experiments have much controversy surrounding them, leading to more recent experiments.

Learn More: How to Cultivate Using the Screen of Green Method

Proving Plants Grow Lavishly When Exposed to Positive Vibrations

Some inspiration for Retallack’s experiments came from Indian botanist, Dr. T. C. Singh, who was head of the Botany Department at Annamalia University (India) in the 60’s. His experiments involved exposing plants to “ragas” (melodic modes in Indian classical music) for various periods of time throughout the day. There were wondrous results; plant metabolic processed accelerated up to 200%. Rice harvests were 25-60% higher than average while peanuts and tobacco produced up to 50% more than average.

A More Recent Study

In 2009, Tan Shen Mynn and Huang Shiqin (their mentor being Dr. Ong Bee) conducted an experiment studying the effects of sound energy on plants. Their results concluded that no matter which type of music a plant is exposed to (they used Zea mays plants, a grass similar to corn or cereal grain), the louder it is, the more abundant it grows. While even heavy metal music helped to increase leaf area by up to 86.2%, classical helped increase leaf size by up to 91.6%. Louder music produced positive effects in germination of the plants. It’s believed this is because the vibrations help the plant carry water and minerals – the stronger the vibrations, the more assistance the vibrations give to the plants.

What This Means for Cannabis Cultivators

Even now, mass producers of cannabis for medical and recreational sales are using music to improve their crops to boost quality, quantity, and overall profit from their harvests. With growing recreational cannabis sales, this trick can come in handy to keep up with demand as well as improve the lives for both the plants and the cultivators growing them.

If planning to play music for your own plants, be sure to experiment with the type of music, the instruments used in the music, and the volume of it as well. You’ll want to try these tricks on one or two plants first before exposing an entire crop to music that might not work in your favor.

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