Bird trills fill the air at Pam and Tony Barich's vineyards at New Residence, but inside a tin shed on the property, their son Adam is making wines to a different tune.
The family have been using biodynamic farming principles to tend to the property on the banks of the River Murray in South Australia since 1976.
In the 90s, they started using audio boxes in their vines that play resonating sound frequencies based on birdsongs.
Then when Adam began making his own wines three years ago, he decided to play healing music during the fermentation process.
"It's a series of songs that have been composed to resonate at a certain frequency to have healing properties," he said.
"They make you more relaxed, help your sleep better or trigger inspiration.
"I thought, 'If the music can heal the world, as it claims, then it probably can't do the wine any harm'.
"It's also nice to have it playing while you're working."
Adam likens his set-up to a "nursery".
Electric blankets are draped over the two fermenters. One contains Montepulciano wine grapes, and the other contains Mencia grapes while music plays out of a speaker.
"A nursery is not a bad description for it because you are nurturing something from one stage to another," he said.
Mr Barich says playing music while fermenting wine fits with biodynamic principles.
The practice was founded in Australia more than 50 years ago. It involves rituals like burying bull horns filled with cow manure into pits to create a dark organic matter called humus to use as fertiliser.
"Music is just another tool to help make the wine and potentially take away the need for other additives," he said.
Baroque music for wine
Sitting atop his timber tree house, permaculture farmer Andrew Duncan looks over the dense ecosystem he has created at his property in Monash.
The system of regenerative farming he follows is "unconventional by Riverland standards", but by planting more trees, almost 50 per cent non-fruiting, he believes he has created a "food forest".
"It's a lovely little haven of biodiversity," he said.
"When I first bought the place, it was just an empty vineyard and a patch of scrub, and there were probably two different species of birds.
"Now there are over 50 different species of birds."
Since 1990, Mr Duncan has been fermenting his wines to baroque music, courtesy of ABC Classic.
"Until the rats ate the stereo system, I'd leave the radio on all the time in the hope that it might make the rats a little happier and less destructive in the winery. But they didn't cooperate," he said.
"I make no apologies for my bias to baroque, but I'm happy to move either way of that a couple of hundred years."
Playing music while fermenting wine, Mr Duncan says, is linked to Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto's work on how human emotions can affect the molecular structure of water.
"Wine is basically just water," Mr Duncan said.
"You can change the structure of something. It might be only transient … but sound is a relevant part of terroir. The beauty of wine is that it's got this ability to express a sense of place.
"The whole concept of terroir is a very big picture thing and part of that picture is sound."
What does the science say?
However, like Adam, Mr Duncan has no way to measure what impact, if any, the music has on his creations.
"The problem is I have no control, but it wouldn't have done the wine any harm," Mr Duncan said.
"Really, it's all about producing something that is part of me.
"I live in a different world to industrial winemaking … I'm lucky in that I can choose to make small volumes the way I see fit."
Sue Bastian is an associate professor of oenology and sensory studies at the University of Adelaide.
She says while the effect of music on human emotions is widely accepted, research into how music affects wine production is limited.
"There's some indication that sound, including frequency and intensity, versus silence, can actually impact singular cellular organisms like yeast and bacteria," Dr Bastian said.
"So it's possible that during fermentation [music] could create a different range or profile of beautiful aroma."
