Didn’t think mushrooms were musical? It’s time to rethink your entire belief system, as one viral YouTube clip shows how wild forest fungi can craft the most abstract tunes imaginable, if only they’re given a means of doing so!
YouTubers, ‘Bionic and the Wires,’ made this absurd theory possible when they hooked a common wild mushroom in Manchester up to a pair of bionic arms, stretched towards a miniature keyboard, and let the mushroom’s natural bio-electrical signals take control. Music Man readers can watch the magic unfold in the video below…
This is probably unlike any music you’ve ever heard before, unless you’re a fan of obscure, art-based ambience. The mushroom taps out janky rhythms which capture a bubbly, hollow sound, with its ‘song’ laced by the natural cawing and tweeting of local forest birds. It almost sounds like a woodpecker tapping on a discarded glass bottle, or a UFO rattling around the walls of a tightly closed universe; yet the mushroom’s echoing rhythms are as oddly soothing as they are extraterrestrial.
Don’t understand how on Earth ‘mushroom music’ is possible? We’ll let Bionic and the Wires explain their experiment in their own words, as merged from descriptions taken from their video and YouTube channel:
“We connect bionic arms to fungi and plants so they can play music and be creative. All life creates bio-electrical signals. Our equipment converts them into signals that control the bionic arms.
“This is a mushroom playing in the wild in some woods. The attached sensors measure bio-electrical fluctuations in the mushroom. The fluctuations are converted into signals that control the robotic arms. The keyboard is playing a synth in Ableton Live” (Ableton being a digital music production software, for unacquainted readers).
“Our art reveals the hidden world of nature […], exploring new ways of thinking about the natural world. Plants and fungi are often overlooked, but they’re not so different from us. Scientists have found they can communicate with each other, remember things, and solve problems. […] Recent research suggests that fungi and plants exhibit surprising levels of intelligence, including decision-making, learning, memory, and the ability to respond to sound waves.”
This is far from the only fungi-making-music clip Bionic and the Wires have posted to their YouTube page. Whilst ‘Mushroom in the Wild Playing Keyboard’ is their most popular video by over 1.3M views, the channel is packed to the brim with videos such as ‘Mushroom Playing a Handpan,’ ‘Moss Playing Keyboard,’ ‘Apple Tree Making Music with a Guitar,’ and even ‘A Christmas Tree Playing Jingle Bells’!
Bionic and the Wires have turned a Manchester mushroom into a surprisingly hypnotic instrument — part art experiment, part extraterrestrial lullaby. Want to hear the full thing and explore more about the project? Check out the useful links just below this paragraph to watch the video and discover more.