Aug 20 2009
The Sound of a Blossom
I have a friend who can identify most birds by their calls. While I can for a scant few species, I rely almost exclusively on sight.
Flowers don’t make sound, so it is impossible to identify a flower with your ears.
Well, at least not without technology and training. I can think of two potential ways to accomplish the feat. The first would be to design and build a sort of super-precise echolocation device. Something that would bounce audio waves off of flowers and then “translate” the sound into the human hearing range. And perhaps magnify the subtle differences in distances as they pertain to form. Would a sunflower have a clearly different audio profile than an iris? I wonder.
The second would be a device that would transform the lightwave color and intensity of a blossom into an audio tone and volume. Some flowers, like the above gerber daisy, would be sort of red-shifted, and fairly loud.
And that concludes this afternoon’s exercise in lateral thinking.
