CCMSAI 2026

Plants and humans interact with the world through profoundly different systems. While plants are known to sense their environment, whether they perceive it remains an open scientific question (Ferretti et al., 2025). Interspecial Signal makes audible the electrical life of a living plant, placing that open question in the listener. A pothos plant is connected to Biotron, a consumer-grade controller that converts changes in the plant's bioelectrical conductivity into MIDI data in real time. That data drives bell-like tones, a radiating visual field, and Somax2, an AI improvisation system trained on a corpus of the author’s own voice, which shadows the plant's signal like an invisible vocalist. Audiences are invited to approach, gesture, and listen, and their proximity shapes what they hear and see. In that shared capacity for sensing, the work offers a point of entry into empathy with a form of life that can otherwise feel wholly alien. This paper documents the work's development across a campus pilot, a conference video, and a museum showing, drawing on audience observations and research on plant awareness disparity. The result is a three-way co-creation between plant, algorithm, and audience, rooted in the proposition that care for the nonhuman world might begin somewhere as small as one “sensational” encounter.