The Long Road

Nothing gets in the way more of sitting at home in your underwear, eating crackers and jamming out on your keyboard, than having a job. On the long road to musical mastery, your job will hinder you more than any other obstacle (aside from sleep, but that can easily be curtailed with a cup coffee and a few minor serious health problems.)

We all enjoy listening to music at work. It's the next best thing we can get to playing music at work, but I think we've all had to endure that "banjos don't pull weeds" lecture at least once in our lives. "It's just common sense". Well, obviously she never took third grade science. I decided it was time I teach her an aesthetically pleasing lesson in garden etiquette.

HYPOTHESIS: Music and gardening go together like peanut butter and bacon

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD: Test that shit

MATERIALS: You can't have a flower dance party without the perfect mixtape. Here's something that's just begging to be taped over.















A little more flower-relevant please.















Perfect.

Figure 3.4: A typical Paenoia Lactiflora.















"I asked it, "so what kind of music do you like?" Its response was cold and reserved, but I could see the curiosity burning through its petioles. We stood there in silence for more than a minute. Suddenly I knew I wasn't going to get a a straight answer."

Figure 7.8: Paenoia Lactiflora equipped with high quality JVC stereophonic audio.















Some people believe that plants will respond to certain frequencies and vibrations at a cellular level, and think that talking to their plants, or playing classical music for them, can increase their yield. Now, I've done no research whatsoever, but nonetheless I assume that countless studies have been conducted on the effects of the music of Mozart, Bach, and the like, on all sorts of flora and fauna.

Boooooooooooring.

Here, for the first time ever, we're going to see how an everyday garden variety peony reacts to some REAL music. Kids these days aren't loading sonatas and arias onto their iPods, they're singing along with MGMT going "doobedoodoop" and occasionally, when the mood warrants, "dipdeepeederpdeedee".

In order to appeal to today's flowering youth, I've decided to crank up the volume, and crank up the rock, with the classic Nine Inch Nails ballad "Closer."

Figure 9.1: Paenoia Lactiflora immediately following exposure to Trentus Reznorium















It seemed like he was really enjoying it at first. In fact, I was half expecting him to whip out his stamen and start photosynthesizing right in front of me. But sometime around the line "you can have my isolation, you can have my hate" something changed. Something snapped. Obviously I didn't get the results I was looking for. Moving on.

Figure 5.7: A plant of the lettuce family, commonly known as lettuce















Figure 7.3: You get the idea















NEW HYPOTHESIS: Music doesn't make plants grow better, hippies and old people have had it wrong the entire time, music makes plants taste better.

MATERIALS: Mouth + lettuce















It tastes just as bad as you would think a big pile of lettuce would taste. And I think it was covered in parasites.

CONCLUSION: I was right, suck it science Further research required.

Time well spent I say. Until next time.

- Alex