Some projects kick off with a business plan. Others begin as a response to an odd little ad in the back of a magazine, or sparked by following a hunch. When you think about it, this is often how the interesting work begins—not with certainty, but with curiosity and enough craft and gumption to stay with the question.

This conversation with Rick Gold and Yuval Ron moves through the strange and increasingly practical territory where music, medicine, plants, and perception collide. We discuss Yuval’s early work with the pioneer of binaural beats and how psychoacoustics adds emotion to film scores. Beyond that there is an audio frontier that includes the exploration of how frequencies can shift attention, mood, and perhaps even help protect cognition.

Their current work takes medicinal herbs and records their bioelectrical activity, then turns those signals into music. Not synth magic, not a novelty trick, but a painstaking process of listening for pattern, repetition, and relationship—finding something humanly hearable inside something that is not human at all. Five years of work. A lot of editing. A lot of not giving up.

There’s something here about collaboration across species, we’ve been doing that with Chinese herbal medicine for a while now. But this new exploration using the language of music. That’s an innovative collaboration. Listen into this conversation and expand your ideas on both music and medicine.