Via this great article on why bots should be more like plants:
Unlike previous generations of pseudoscientists, [Monica] Gagliano is not looking to see if plants like Mozart, but rather trying to understand what “listening” might actually mean for them. In a call for studies on acoustic communication in plants, she wrote: “The specific sensory mechanisms available in plants for detecting sound are still unclear, although they are likely to be an aspect of the multifaceted phenomenon of mechanosensing, the intrinsic ability to sense and respond to mechanical perturbations.” So plants might not “listen” so much as respond to vibrations at specific frequencies.
I particularly like the idea of “mechanosensing”.
