Today on this gadget blog designed to bring you all things exciting and hi-tech, I bring you plants.

What’s that you say? Plants aren’t hi-tech and are barely exciting? Well, on any other day about any other plant, you may have a point. These plants, however, were designed by students at Keio University in Tokyo to be just about the most exciting, and unique plants in existence. That’s because they are built with a series of LED lights, sensor modules, speakers, and good old fashioned programming that turn them into musical instruments.

Umm…..Not Quite.

Dubbed “Sound Gardening,” they’re designed for multiple users to experience at once. The plants are real, and respond to touch and movement to generate certain noises, music, and voices. Certain plants work together to create a melody, and when a series of proper sensors are activated, a bonus sound appropriate to the current melody is played. The technology that powers this invention is fairly impressive, yet oddly, according to one of the sound designers on the project, the most difficult part was actually getting the plants to sing. Along with voices being triggered by specific motions, the voice feature is also used to alert passerbys of the plant’s capabilities as it will whisper “Hey, over here” in Japanese after 30 seconds of inactivity.

The team behind this project imagines that it can be used as a group musical activity, but their main motivation behind it seemed to be as a creative outlet to allow them to work on something outside of the normal creative constrictions. In short, they wanted to have fun with this project, and they’ve already noticed how much fun others have when they try it as well. Being in nature is very relaxing in and of itself, and when you combine interactive social music in with that, you have a device that can produce sheer joy and pure imagination. In a world where technology seems to be aimed at making our lives more and more stressful, inventions like this that first look like mere novelties are sometimes more important than they appear.