Modelling Resilience: Tomato Plant Physiological Responses to Sound Under Stress

Abstract

Defining what it means to ‘be alive’ is a pursuit that defies yet unifies multiple points of our understanding of resilience. To explore this concept, resilience can be viewed as a central criterion for redefining life, particularly in non-animal forms like plants, whose responses to stress reflect adaptive survival, and consequently, resilience. Emerging studies in plant bioacoustics reveal how sound frequencies influence plant height and leaf growth when stress is induced. By expanding on these findings, this research explores how sound frequencies affect tomato plant height and leaf growth as a sign of resilience. Through a controlled experiment, plants were exposed to specific sound frequencies (None, 400 Hz, 800 Hz, and 1200 Hz) inside a soundproof-box environment. Measurements of plant height and leaf growth were recorded to evaluate differences between control and experimental groups, as well as the prevalence of resilience. Collected data helped evaluate the hypothesis of “When the controlled soundproof environment is incorporated, the experiment will result in statistically significant differences in height growth in tomato plants under stress conditions and sound frequencies.” The quantitative data were then analyzed to determine how sound frequencies enhanced plant growth, which were interpreted qualitatively to consider how these biological physiological responses might inform our understanding of resilience as a defining characteristic of life. This study aims to contribute to discussions within the literature on plant-sound interactions within soundproofed environments and the resilience factor as a connecting key indicator of what it means to truly “be alive.”