Music created from bioelectric recordings of cancer-treating plants

In 2019, composer and musician Helen Anahita Wilson was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her subsequent treatment became the creative spark for the work Linea Naturalis, in which she recorded the micro-electric fluctuations of plants used in anti-cancer treatments and chemotherapy, turning them into a 45-minute soundscape.

To create the piece, Wilson collaborated with London’s Chelsea Physic Garden, a botanic plot with a large collection of specimens that have medicinal and healing properties. She took 28 bioelectric recordings from plants used in cancer treatment. This included Madagascan periwinkle, which has yielded compounds used to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma and some types of leukaemia, and English yew, whose extracts have led to chemotherapy drugs for breast and ovarian cancer.

Each plant had a unique signature, affected by light, temperature or wound healing, which Wilson then converted into audible sound and layered into a final composition. “Having had chemotherapy and surgery and radiotherapy,” says Wilson, “I’ve done a lot of wound healing myself.”