"Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" is an album by Stevie Wonder, originally released on the Tamla Motown label on October 30, 1979. It serves as the soundtrack to the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, directed by Walon Green, based on the book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. The album features two singles that reached the Billboard Hot 100 charts: "Send One Your Love," which peaked at No. 4, and the minor hit "Outside My Window," which reached No. 52. Additionally, the single "Black Orchid" reached No. 63 in the UK.
Wonder created the film score by having Michael Braun, the film's producer, describe each visual image in detail while sound engineer Gary Olazabal specified the length of each passage. This information was processed to a four-track tape, with the film's sound on one of the tracks, allowing Wonder space to add his musical accompaniment. He aimed to translate the complex information from the book and film into song lyrics. For instance, "Same Old Story" conveys the scientific findings of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who developed instruments to measure plants' responses to stimuli, as well as the breakthroughs of African-American agriculturalist George Washington Carver. While most songs were written by Stevie Wonder, some were collaborations with Syreeta Wright, Yvonne Wright, and Michael Sembello.
Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" features new synthesizer combinations, including the first use of a digital sampling synthesizer, the Computer Music Melodian, utilized in most tracks on the album. This album is noted as an early digital recording, released three months after Ry Cooder's Bop till You Drop, which is generally considered the first digitally recorded popular music album, with Wonder's work being the second. He was an early adopter of this technology, using it for all his subsequent recordings. The music was recorded onto U-matic video tapes using a Sony PCM-1600 digital PCM adaptor and edited with a digital controller also from Sony.
