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Savia Flow · Open instrument · Commons Hub, Austrian Alps · 2026

Plants already sing.
We lowered the pitch.

Savia Flow reads the electrical rhythm of a living plant — water rising, light landing, a leaf being touched — and plays it as music, live. Built by hand, open source, forty-four euros in parts.

Collect the artifact →

Signal · live generator · press play

01 · The instrument

Three parts. One circuit.

01 · Contact

Two electrodes

One on a leaf, one near the roots. The plant closes the circuit.

02 · Rhythm

A pulse

A simple timer circuit turns the plant’s changing resistance into a heartbeat. Faster when the sap moves, slower when it rests.

03 · Voice

A voice

A microcontroller maps that heartbeat to notes and sends them to any synth over Bluetooth. The plant chooses the timing. The artist chooses the instrument.

“Nothing here is imagined. Every note is the plant’s own electricity, in the plant’s own time.”

WHAT IT HEARS: water status · ion movement · light · temperature · touch · wounding.
WHAT IT DOES NOT HEAR: thoughts. See The Science →

02 · The artist Step by Steph · Live with plants

Nature’s voice, in an artistic format.

Step by Steph is a multidisciplinary artist and creative technologist whose work is permanently archived on the Moon through the Lunaprise Museum. With Savia Flow she performs live with plants: a garden on stage, each species wired to its own voice, and the set built in real time around what they play. The plant sets the tempo and the phrasing; she answers with harmony, texture, and rhythm. Nothing is pre-recorded from the plant side. Every set is a first take.

Format live DJ + plant ensemble · 45–90 min
Setting gardens · forests · fire circles · galleries · night
First residency set Commons Hub, Hirschwang an der Rax · Sep 2026
Book a plant set →
03 · The sets

Proofs. Unedited.

Recordings from the bench and the garden. One plays at a time — press play, and the waveform you see is the audio you are hearing.

Every proof is a single take from a live plant through Savia Flow v0. Add them to the set and the page mixes them end to end.

04 · The network Mycelial network · Reticulum · Off-grid

Two plants, one message, no internet.

Every Savia unit can be a node. Over Reticulum — a mesh protocol that runs on LoRa radios with no towers, no accounts, and no internet — a plant in one greenhouse can send its rhythm to a plant in another valley. The second unit plays it. We call this the mycelial network: the plants’ signals moving between places the way nutrients move between roots, through a living layer we host together, not a cloud somebody else owns.

Node A · Höllental · greenhouse 47.70 N · 15.79 E · 610 m Node B · Tulum · garden 20.21 N · 87.43 W · 9 m LoRa 868 / 915 MHz

Link idle · 0 messages · awaiting transmit

Reticulum · LoRa 868/915 MHz · LXMF messages · end-to-end encrypted · no internet required.

The plants are not “talking” to each other. Their signals are. What that exchange means is the exploration.

05 · The signal

From electricity to music, and to knowledge.

Electrodes Resistance Pulse rate MIDI notes Synth Features Session log Open dataset Classifiers The ear The record · rate, variance, spike count, diurnal phase
For the ear

Notes, scales, timing. The musician’s layer. Latency under 20 ms.

For the record

Each session logged as an append-only entry: what plant, where, when, what happened. Nobody can edit history.

For knowledge

An open, community-governed dataset. Contributions are credited. Classifiers trained on it are published back, free.

Data stays with the people who recorded it. Exports are opt-in. Nothing is sold.

06 · Sensing

What else the same signal knows.

Wildfire · Research direction

A forest that says it is thirsty before it burns.

Drought and heat stress change a plant’s electrical rhythm days before leaves change color — and researchers have recorded plants emitting ultrasonic clicks when dehydrated. Savia nodes wired to sentinel plants across a slope, linked over Reticulum, can send those changes to a mesh with no internet and no power grid: a living early-warning layer that costs forty-four euros a node. We are building the first prototype in the Höllental. This is a research direction, not a certified fire system — and we will publish everything we learn.

Slope hydrated · spike density low · mesh up · 7 / 7 nodes reporting

Health · Plants and people

The health of the plant. The attention of the person.

For the plant: the same signal that makes music tells a grower when a plant is thirsty, hurt, or under attack — long before it shows.

For the person: listening to a living thing in its own time is a practice of attention. We make no medical claims. We do know that gardens, hospices, schools, and elder homes already keep plants; Savia Flow gives those plants a voice in the room.

07 · The vote Ritual governance · Playful, not binding

What if the garden had a seat at the table?

Communities decide things. Plants live with the consequences. Savia Flow lets a circle pose a question, wire two plants to two options, and listen for a set time: the plant whose rhythm shifts most “speaks.” It is not a measurement of preference — it is a way to slow a decision down, bring a non-human presence into the room, and take a reading of the moment. We use it to open assemblies at the Commons Hub. Some rooms are better for it.

Option A

shift —

Option B

shift —

No reading yet · pose a question, then listen.

08 · The science

A hundred and fifty years of listening.

1873First recorded plant action potential — the Venus flytrap.
1900sJ. C. Bose builds instruments to record plant electrical responses.
2006Slow wave potentials described: an electrical signal unique to plants.
2012Plant bioacoustics named as a field; roots later shown to grow toward the sound of water.
2021Stress-specific electrical signatures; plants proposed as low-cost biosensors.
2023Cell: stressed plants emit airborne ultrasonic clicks; machine learning classifies species and thirst from sound alone.
2025Commercial plant electrophysiology monitors 1,000+ hectares of European crops (Vivent).
2026Savia Flow: the open, €44, artist-first end of the same field.

What we will never say

  • the plant feels
  • the plant thinks
  • the plant loves
  • the plant wants
  • it recognizes you
  • it reads your emotions

The 1968 “plant perception” experiments did not replicate. Rigor is how nature keeps its voice credible.

09 · Build it

Forty-four euros. Two hours. Yours.

The kit · €44 in parts · 2 hours · open source

Build the instrument

ESP32 · 555 timer · optocoupler
TENS electrodes · LiPo + USB-C charger
laser-cut enclosure (files included)

Firmware: open-source biodata sonification, MIT.

Get the files →

First workshop: Commons Hub fablab, September 2026. Every participant leaves with a working instrument.

The artifact · Artizen · open edition

Collect the artifact

Collecting the artifact funds the residency edition of Savia Flow — one instrument stays in the valley permanently — the build-your-own workshop, and the open release of the kit so gardens, hubs, and land projects anywhere can build their own.

Collect on Artizen →
10 · The run First run · 144 instruments · at cost

One hundred and forty-four.

The first run is 144 instruments at €44 — what the parts actually cost, with nothing added on top. Twelve dozen is small on purpose: enough to put a node in a garden, a hub, a school and a slope in different places, and few enough that every one is built by hand at the Commons Hub fablab and tested before it leaves. The campaign pays for the boards, the enclosures, the test rig and the postage. The €44 pays for the parts.

Every instrument goes to someone who will use it and can be reached: people who backed the campaign, and the gardens, hubs and schools we place nodes with so the mesh has somewhere to be. The exact split is set when the campaign opens.

What a plant instrument costs today
InstrumentListed price
PlantWave$299
Plants Play€376
Music of the Plants · Bamboo M€398
Music of the Plants · U1 Pro€598
Savia Flow€44 in parts · files included

Prices as listed by each maker, August 2026. These are good instruments and some of them taught us what this is — see The Science. Savia Flow is not trying to beat them. It is trying to be the end of the field a garden can afford and a school can repair.

The path to 144

What has to happen

    How it gets paid for

    The artifact, and the number of people who collect it.

    The artifact is a $10 open edition on Artizen. All of it reaches the project — Artizen takes no cut. And every dollar of artifact sales unlocks a matching dollar from each Fund backing the project, for as long as those funds last.

    Which means the count matters more than the cheque: a hundred people at $10 moves more than one person at $1,000. That is the whole reason we are asking widely and asking small.

    144 × €44 = €6,336 in parts · plus boards, enclosures, the test rig and postage · every unit tested before it ships

    Collect the artifact →

    Artizen’s terms as published, August 2026 — we confirm the current round before the campaign opens.

    144 now. 1,440 when the board is proven. The number after that is not ours to promise.

    11 · Questions

    Straight answers.

    Is the music really made by the plant?
    Yes — every note’s timing comes from the plant’s own electrical rhythm. The artist chooses the instrument and the scale; the plant chooses when.
    Does the plant feel anything?
    We don’t know, and Savia Flow doesn’t claim to. It measures electrical changes in living tissue. That is remarkable enough.
    Can I build one?
    Yes. Files, firmware, and a two-page guide are open source. About €44 in parts — the honest number once you have bought every part singly rather than a thousand at a time.
    Why €44 and not €30?
    Because €30 was the number for someone who already owns a soldering iron, a spare cell and a drawer full of parts. €44 is what it costs to buy every part singly and end up with a working instrument — enclosure, battery, charger and electrodes included. We would rather publish the real number and hit it.
    What happens after the first 144?
    The price goes up. The 144 go out at cost because the campaign carries everything around them — boards, enclosures, the test rig, the postage. A second run has to carry itself, including the replacements and the email, and €44 does not stretch that far. The files stay free either way.
    What is Reticulum?
    An open mesh networking protocol that works over LoRa radio without internet. We use it so plants can share signals between places with no cloud in the middle.
    Can it detect fires?
    Not yet, and not alone. It can detect drought stress early, and that is the research we are running. We will publish results either way.
    Who owns the data?
    The person who recorded it. Exports are opt-in, nothing is sold, and the dataset is community-governed.
    Where does the money go?
    100% of artifact sales go to the project. Artizen takes no cut.
    Savia Flowlive generator