Plenty of gardeners talk to their plants, and just as many will happily tell you their tomatoes seem to do better with the radio on. The idea has a specific origin: in 1973, Dorothy Retallack published a book called "The Sound of Music and Plants," describing experiments where plants grown next to classical or Indian music leaned toward the speaker, while plants exposed to rock music leaned away, wilted, or died. It's a great story, and it's the reason the "plants like music" idea is everywhere today, but it was never rigorous science. Retallack's setup wasn't peer-reviewed, used tiny sample sizes, and never controlled for other differences between the test groups, like airflow, heat from the equipment, or how often each room was checked on and watered. Botanists have treated it as folklore rather than findings ever since.
That doesn't mean plants are deaf to their physical environment, though, just that "hearing" is the wrong word for what's actually going on. Plants have no ears, no nervous system, and nothing resembling a capacity to enjoy a genre of music, but they are genuinely sensitive to vibration. A 2014 study by Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft at the University of Missouri, published in the peer-reviewed journal Oecologia, found that Arabidopsis plants primed with a recording of the exact vibration pattern made by a caterpillar chewing on a leaf went on to produce more defensive mustard-oil compounds than plants exposed to silence, or to other vibrations like wind or insect mating calls. That's a real, measurable response, but it's a threat-detection system tuned to one very specific signal, not a taste in music.
So the leaning-and-wilting effect Retallack reported almost certainly came down to mundane differences between her test setups rather than any actual preference for Bach over rock. If a plant near a speaker gets slightly more airflow, a few extra degrees of warmth, or slightly more attentive watering because someone keeps walking over to check the equipment, it's going to look healthier regardless of what's playing.
Here's the stranger, genuinely credible twist: plants may not listen to sound, but they might make some of their own. A 2023 study by researchers at Tel Aviv University, published in the journal Cell, used sensitive microphones to record drought-stressed and cut-stem tomato and tobacco plants emitting airborne, ultrasonic clicking sounds, too high-pitched for humans to hear without help, most likely caused by air bubbles bursting inside the plant's water-transport tissue. Healthy, unstressed plants stayed almost silent by comparison. Follow-up work has even found that some moths can detect and respond to these clicks.
plants may not listen to sound, but they might make some of their own
None of this means blasting Fleetwood Mac at your tomatoes will help them along, but it turns out the plants might be the noisy ones in the garden, not you.