Playing a Forest Of Cordyceps: Mushrooms Playing Synth

I’ve been making music my whole life and have been working with electronic music for the last seventeen years. About six years ago I got pretty heavily into hardware specifically eurorack modular synthesizers. I taught myself electrical engineering and up until the pandemic was working for a major modular synthesizer company as a production technician.

Without the pandemic it’s likely I would still be working for them and not connecting my synths to mushrooms and crystals.

I think with the pandemic we have all been spending a lot more time at home. As I’ve been unemployed there has been an interesting arc to my hobbies being stuck at home. I began doing a lot of beer brewing which transformed into fermentation, making sourdough, kombucha koji and some other deliciousness. I’ve grown oyster mushrooms off and on for years but never cordyceps before. I got interested in cordyceps and found a few in a hike. Before I knew it my music studio was filled with growing oyster mushrooms and cordyceps as I played with the idea of trying to get some sort of mushroom related business going .

I by no means invented the process of bio data sonification. I think I first became aware of it three years ago. Basically it’s using a technology similar to a lie detector. It runs a small amount of current through the subject and is able to sense the resistance or impedance. Changes in resistance are converted to musically useful control signals. With the use of a modular synthesizer I can route these signals to control when the note plays, how long it is, the pitch, it’s timbre and some parameter of effects as well.

Having a room full of synthesizer and mushrooms in the house it seemed like the next obvious step to try and hook them together. Originally I wanted to build my own device as the technology is fairly simple and within the grasp of my electrical engineering knowledge, but I was so busy growing mushrooms that I ended up deciding I would buy the Instruo Scion a bio data sonification module. Finding one proved difficult as they are out of stock everywhere besides Australia, however thankfully I had a friend who offered to sell me one of his as he had two. Depending on how everything goes I may end up building some of my own devices as well. It seems like this endeavor may actually take over the mushroom business idea. We shall see.

As far as the crystals go my wife runs an online crystal shopping Etsy called Mandala Gems. I think I am the first person to ever hook a crystal up to a bio data sonification device. The idea came about because we have so many crystals and because of a dream I had a small child.

When I was maybe 10 I had a dream about hooking crystals up to batteries with coils of wire around them and them glowing. I begged my parents to buy me a battery holder alligator clips and wire. They humored me and did but when I hooked these things up to a quartz crystal I had obviously nothing happened. But I remembered this when trying to figure out if I could hook a crystal up to the synth and decided to give t a go some 20 some odd years later.

I honestly didn’t expect anything to happen but was delightfully surprised when I got my first crystal to sing. I am somewhat of a skeptic and am not really sure where the variations of impedance are coming from. It could just be stray electromagnetic waves, after all the loop of copper wire is essentially a crude antenna. however changing crystals and moving other crystals around the one I have hooked up does seem to change the results.

The sounds are not coming from the mushrooms but rather from a modular synthesizer. The mushrooms are controlling the synthesizer using a bio data sonification module called the Instruo Scion.Small amounts of current are run through the mushrooms to measure the electrical resistance similar to a lie detector test. Changes in resistance are converted to control voltages and gate signals which are used to control the synthesizer. The mushrooms have control over when the notes are played, how long they are played, what pitch they are, some control over timbre aka how the sound sounds and harmonic content as well as control over effect parameters such as filtering, delay and reverb