Arjan Singh Discusses Plant Music and the Emphasis of Time In Music
Tom Jakob | 8/31/2023
If there are two things that all art seems to require, they are patience and organic beginnings––just as a seed needs plenty of time and clean soil to grow into a luscious tomato, so too do our projects. New York City-based composer, performer, and conductor Arjan Singh and his latest project, Plant Music, are near-perfect demonstrations of the ingredients needed to create captivating art.
“I feel like one of the most difficult things as a performer is actually to have patience,” Arjan said in a phone interview. “A lot of the times, [performers] think about playing super fast notes all the time. Or just having great technique, great tone––this and that. But we always forget about the ability to know when to not play something as well.”
Arjan began his journey into music at a young age by studying Indian classical music on the violin, eventually getting sucked into American “band culture” and thusly “trying to pick up as many instruments” as he could. As Arjan sees it, this helped lay the ultimate foundation for what has become his work’s most consistent themes: timing and nature. This is partly because Indian classical music uses a great deal of improvisation, which itself relies heavily on good timing while still rejecting convention for individualistic beauty, much like the natural world.
“I like to really pay a lot of attention to how I use time because, to me, time is the medium that music is using,” Arjan said. “So being as cautious and precise as I can be, as natural as I can be with how I'm using time, and making things feel comfortable to the listener in terms of how things are set up in either my music or my performances, that's really important to me.”
After pursuing his undergrad at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Arjan then moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in composition at the New School. But while in Boston, and still in New York City, Arjan feels a deep sense of longing to return to natural surroundings.
“I like the culture of urban spaces,” Arjan said. “I like being surrounded by people. I feel like it's more diverse. [...] But I always feel like I can never really get outside. Even the parks in New York can be a great escape, but like Central Park, even though it's huge, it still feels like it's inside, like it's still surrounded by four walls of concrete.”
Thus Plant Music was born. The project is a live experimental performance piece that implements a device and software, known as an Arduino, to produce electronic sounds. Though it sounds complicated, according to Arjan “the design of this instrument conceptually is pretty simple.”
Using the Arduino, electricity runs through both the plants and Arjan. When Arjan touches the plant, electricity flows through him and the plant. That information is sent back into a computer and completes the circuit. Each time that circuit is complete, it tells the computer that Arjan has touched the plant, which then produces a sound.
As Arjan describes it, Plant Music is not meant to deliver a poignant message, but rather is meant to serve as “an exploration” of “moral ideas about nature and music.”
“Am I making the music through the plants or just using the plants? Is this even ethical?” Arjan said. “I'm inspired by nature and yet the music that is being created is synthetic because that's also the only way that I can make music with plants.”
The current engineering behind Plant Music is a result of Arjan’s recent foray into electronic music, but says he has plans to develop the project into something more over time.
“You can create electrodes to attach onto plants that will actually read the electrical signals that plants themselves give off, which also change depending on the plant’s moods and behavior itself, which is really, really neat,” Arjan said. “And that, to me, even makes it feel more like the plants themselves are creating the music rather than me making music through plants.”
According to Arjan, Plant Music was a project that, although “a slow burn” to becoming a finished product, took inspiration from “an accumulation of years and years of just thinking about the kind of work that I want to make.”
Family history also played a part in the inspiration behind Plant Music. Though having grown up in the Bay Area, frequently going on hikes with his father, Arjan’s family derives from the magnificent landscapes of Punjab, a region in South Asia that includes parts of India and Pakistan.
“A lot of it is also sort of a longing, a deep longing, to be back to my homeland of Punjab, which is where my family's from,” Arjan said. “My mom always tells me about the scents of the flowers. And so I just have this longing to sort of be in those spaces sometimes.”
As Arjan puts it, “there isn't really any specific reason why,” his music began to gravitate toward the themes of timing and nature. But to an unbiased third party, it’s easier to visualize the roadmap that led Arjan from Indian classical violin tunes to making music out of a garden. Arjan’s story is nothing short of poetic serendipity. The intersection of Arjan’s many life experiences ––from his family history to his education and subsequent places of residence, to the very essence of music itself–– have so clearly come together to form a terrific story that champions how creativity is almost always the result of, if nothing else, organic timing.
“I found that all of the pieces that I would write about would happen to have some kind of theme related to nature or to animals or scenery,” Arjan said. “When I sit down to write a piece of music, I almost improvise straight through, I don't try to dwell on it too much. And the reason for that is I want it to feel as natural to the listener as possible. I want music to feel like it's just growing organically.”
Arjan will be performing Plant Music on Sep. 8 at the Silk Road Cafe in New York City. Doors open at 8 p.m. There is a door fee, which is reduced for students. For those who cannot attend, a recording of Plant Music is available to watch on Arjan's website. Be sure to follow Arjan on Instagram for updates on his work.