Woman Records the ‘Voice of a Sunflower’ — and It Sounds Like Music From Another Dimension

Using some kind of microphone attached to her phone, a woman claims to have recorded the “voice” of sunflowers in her backyard.

A few online articles about this report that the woman posted it to Facebook and the video went viral, but it’s nowhere to be found, while republished versions of the video with nearly 100,000 views can in fact be found on Facebook. According to one article:

“With a microphone and her mobile phone, the woman records the vibration sound from the sunflowers which sounds like a high-pitched radio wave Impressed by the recording, she later shared the video on her Facebook and the video immediately became viral with hundreds of thousands of views so far.”

If this is real, the sound resembles some kind of angelic horn section, or a gentle trumpet.

Rigid skeptics might not be able to see the beauty in this, and it would be wise to question whether this is real or not, but plants using sounds to communicate is actually a well established scientific fact.

(Image credit: mesosyn)

A study out of the University of Western Australia titled “Tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water,” published in the journal Oecologia proved that plants can acutely sense sound vibrations that emanate from running water, whether it’s in the soil or trickling through pipes, and sensing the sound helps plants move their roots closer to the source of water.

The study even went so far as to claim plants dislike certain sounds and will move their roots away from the source of some sounds. Apparently they communicate with “clicking” sounds.

Dr Monica Gagliano, a lead researcher in the study of UWA’s Centre of Evolutionary Biology at the School of Animal Biology noted that it makes sense plants would be capable of doing this, for the simple fact that they need water.

(Image credit: paulinemoss)

“We used the common garden pea plant (Pisum sativum) as the model for our study and put the plant into a container which had two tubes at the base, giving it a choice of two directions for the growth of its roots,” the researcher said.

“We then exposed the plant to a series of sounds, including white noise, running water and then a recording of running water under each tube, and observed its behaviour.”

They proved that based on nothing but the sound of running water, plants sent roots in the direction of it.

“It also was surprising and extraordinary to see that the plant could actually tell when the sound of running water was a recording and when it was real and that the plant did not like the recorded sound,” the lead researcher continued.

(Image credit: bioscriptionblog)

Does it seem ridiculous that a woman claims to have recorded the sound of a sunflower? Hopefully it doesn’t, because we need every excuse we can find to appreciate nature, and if that makes you cringe, maybe you should check what you hold dear in life.