Nestled in a quiet alleyway off Taichung’s once-bustling Art Street, artist and musician Nick Tsai has immersed himself in an intimate dialogue with plant life. Working in his N Studio, Tsai creates music by channeling the subtle bioelectrical currents of common flora through modular synthesizers, transforming their unpredictable signals into otherworldly soundscapes.
Housed in a white townhouse with front and back courtyards overflowing with greenery, N Studio serves as both workshop and laboratory for these innovative plant-based sound creations. He shares the lush space with his girlfriend, Lai Yifan (賴怡帆), and her clothing brand Birphin (海豚鳥). Surrounded by ferns, potted plants, and a maze of cables and electronic equipment, the sensory-rich environment inspires both his music and their collaborations.
Tsai’s initial love of plants began in 2015 while working at the Nordic antique furniture store Hauspert. “My boss, Xiao Bai (小白),” he says, “had a great love of succulents and staghorn ferns. In his spare time, he’d often share with me the unique and rare plants he was collecting. Since I had a good set-up at home—living in Taichung with gardens in both the front and back—I started growing plants too, trying to decorate the place.”
During this time, Tsai’s focus was on horticulture and furniture design while his interest in music simmered in the background. This began to change in 2018 when he discovered the electronic soundscapes of Nine Inch Nails and Atticus Ross while watching the film The Social Network. He started listening profusely to ambient and experimental electronic music. Soon after, Tsai encountered modular synthesizers and was struck by their structural possibilities. He attended a workshop led by Taiwanese synthesizer veteran MAD and began practicing daily. Falling down the “modular synth rabbit hole,” he started acquiring an ever-expanding array of equipment.
In 2020, Tsai began performing synthesizer music live. That same year, the Scottish Eurorack modular company Instruo released SCÍON, a biofeedback sensor that translates signals from contact with organic surfaces into musical control signals. Tsai acquired the module and began experimenting with his plants. He launched his Plant Sonification project the following year.
“Every month I would select a plant to connect to the module,” Tsai says. “I created music according to the plant’s posture, texture, and leaf shape. Later, I collaborated with the new media artist Wu Guan Ru (吳冠儒) to develop a plant-touch interface suited specifically to our needs, enabling us to feature plants in live performances and sound installations.”
Avant-garde artists have long incorporated plant life into music,
a tradition Tsai’s work continues. Attracted by plants’ qualities of chance and indeterminacy, composers have used them to break from conventional musical structures. In 1975, John Cage experienced a pivotal moment when a dancer placed a dried cactus next to his ear and plucked its spines. This inspired his use of cacti in compositions such as Child of Tree and Branches, in which all the instruments were amplified plant materials, including cacti and rattles made from Poinciana (Delonix regia) tree branches.
Tsai says the unpredictability of plant life has allowed him to move beyond the main thread of his music—often ambient works that seek stability and harmony. His Plant Sonification project opens up discordant possibilities and a new sonic spectrum, with each organism lending itself to unique rhythms, textures, and sound palettes.
“The Taiwanese tree-fern (Cibotium taiwanense), for example,” Tsai says, “has stems that grow upward in a winding pattern, with the tangle of stems below the crown covered in golden fuzz. Its fronds are thin, finely divided, and tripinnate, giving it a highly organic posture. The fuzzy stems impart a soft quality, while the fronds are light and water-licking, giving the plant an overall neutral, slightly bright tone.
“Based on these characteristics, the sound design uses a neutral-to-brightly-tinged Mixolydian scale. The high-frequency range (2–20 kHz) is slightly boosted to create a sense of airiness. Some parameters are controlled by sine-wave LFOs with randomly varying frequencies, simulating the stem’s organic, winding form. The frond-leaves’ delicacy means their signals are less stable and trigger less frequently than those from more water-retentive plants. Notes generated from tree ferns feature longer rests, creating more space and a distinct sonic texture.”
Advances in technology over the past two decades have renewed the debate over plant cognition, prompting many scientists to conduct experiments testing its validity. Proponents such as plant scientist Monica Gagliano argue that plants demonstrate complex behavior suggestive of cognition. Her 2016 experiments with peas indicated that plants can engage in associative learning. Gagliano conditioned seedlings to associate a neutral stimulus—a fan’s airflow—with light, showing they grew toward the fan even in the absence of light, a response reminiscent of Pavlovian conditioning in animals.
Gagliano’s findings remain controversial, however, and subsequent studies have yielded inconsistent results. Scientists such as Daniel Chamovitz remain dismissive, arguing that such findings reflect adaptive mechanisms rather than cognition, as plants lack neural structures.
Tsai says he doesn’t have a definitive view on the question of plant consciousness. “From a rational perspective, many scientific studies suggest that plants don’t possess consciousness at a human level,” he says. “However, in a broader sense, they do exhibit a form of microconsciousness—the ability to sense their environment, integrate feedback, transmit information, and exhibit behaviors analogous to neural networks. In that sense, I would agree with the scientific conclusion that they meet some aspects of the definition of consciousness.
“From an emotional perspective, however, I believe that everything possesses a spirit—an idea that’s probably closer to the philosophical perspective of panpsychism. I’m in awe of phenomena that lie beyond the scope of science. Attributing a spirit or a form of subjective consciousness to plants might seem like an interpretive choice that disregards science, but for me, it’s about a mindset of respecting all things and co-existing with them.”
Through his workshops and performances, Tsai extends this experimentation to the public, combating the phenomenon that botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler called “plant blindness”—the human tendency to overlook plants because they lack strong visual attention cues. Wandersee and Schussler argued that our generally limited understanding of plant structure and diversity poses a major obstacle to addressing global warming and other environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
“From my own experiences meeting people through workshops and performances, and from what I’ve seen in my daily life,” Tsai says, “although people in Taiwan are accustomed to greenery in their lifestyles and enjoy venturing into the mountains to experience nature, not everyone is motivated to gain a deeper understanding of plant life or to view plants from a broader ecological perspective. Maybe what Plant Sonification offers, then, is a novel way to observe plants more intimately.
“On another level, Plant Sonification is about more than simply observing the biological features of plants. More importantly, it transforms those perceptions into creative work. It’s about awakening people’s imaginations and creative potentials, refining our synaesthetic abilities, and cultivating originality to produce unique, coherent works.”
The project is also about exploring a harmonious relationship between technology and plant life. “I don’t think technology and plants are inherently in conflict,” he says. “Technology is a tool, an extension of humanity, and tools in themselves are neutral. Conflict arises when humans view plants or natural phenomena as a problem, attempting to control it. But if we view humans and plants as being part of the same natural system, then we can use these tools to seek co-existence. Plant Sonification is an artistic expression of this co-existence.”
This interview was commissioned by the Taichung Art Museum and first published in the fifth issue of The Subconscious Restaurant, the sister publication of White Fungus. The issue formed part of a collaborative project tied to the museum's inaugural exhibition, A Call of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place. On March 7, 2026, White Fungus hosted a sound event in the museum's Culture Forest, featuring a performance by Nick Tsai.
