Singing Plants

One day when I was taking a walk with my little sister, she started singing to the leaves and flowers, hoping for a botanical duet. I wondered: what if her youthful fantasy were true? What if plants appreciate our singing, and could sing back to us. 

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To realize this surrealist creation, I returned to my passive amplifier knowledge on the physics to speakers to apply the same principle on leaves. In a speaker, the electric current carries electrically-coded music from the source through a copper coil, producing an electromagnetic field that interacts with a magnet in the middle of a coil. The coil vibrates along with the speaker cone surrounding it, pushing and pulling the air to create sound waves that we can sing and dance to.

To make leaves behave the same way, I connected a coil of copper foil to an audio amplifier, essentially turning the leaf into a simple speaker. When I played music on my phone, the copper coil vibrated, which vibrated the leaf, and played my sister’s favorite song, Let It Go, as she listened with a thrill.

Here's a video of how I made it (please turn up the volume at the end since the sound was not very loud.):