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We have put together a max patch that semi-generatively produces a soundscape for the installation, it chooses tones from a list by random, and also changes the pitch between two set variables randomly each time, to give more of a naturalistic output.
It also has space for more than one set of tones, and more than one atmospheric tone, once implemented these will be used for the changing nature of the installation.
Displaying Fungal ‘Music’ through a real-time sound and Light Installations
Mushrooms emit a specific kind of electronic activity that has been researched into and found to contain around 50 “words”. This boils down to these words not being words exactly, but patterns of activity which can be perceived as communication, similar research has been conducted into trees and yield similar results.
One possible avenue we could look down is the production of “mushroom music” for an installation. Multiple artists have ventured into this in recent years and find interesting results. The Idea of experiencing audio and visual feedback originating live from mushrooms is interesting enough, but the idea doesn’t go much “deeper”.
Our plan then is to create an installation that uses sound transferred from the electrical signals of a cluster of fungi to create a sonic space, with a light setup that reflects the different frequencies given out in a visually interesting way.
The Installation could be simply passive, participants could walk in and through the room and simply enjoy the experience. Alternatively we have the option to have the participants interact with the mushrooms and see the change of the electronic signals live in the form of sonic and visual output.
“evidence has been obtained that indeed fungi respond to mechanical, chemical and optical stimulation by changing the pattern of its electric activity and, in many cases, modifying characteristics of their spike trains.” [1]
Adamatzky, Andrew. “Language of Fungi Derived from Their Electrical Spiking Activity.” Royal Society Open Science 9, no. 4 (April 2022). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926.
“While studying another species of fungus, Ganoderma resinaceum, we found that the most common width of an electrical potential spike is 5–8 min. In both species of fungi, we observed bursts of spiking in the trains of the spike similar to that observed in the central nervous system. While the similarity could be just phenomenological, this indicates a possibility that mycelium networks transform information via interaction of spikes and trains of spikes in manner homologous to neurons.” [1]
“We recorded extracellular electrical activity of four species of fungi. We found evidences of the spike trains propagating along the mycelium network. We speculated that fungal electrical activity is a manifestation of the information communicated between distant parts of the fungal colonies.” [1]
“We therefore attempted to uncover key linguistic phenomena of the proposed fungal language. We found that distributions of lengths of spike trains, measured in a number of spikes, follow the distribution of word lengths in human languages. We found that size of fungal lexicon can be up to 50 words; however, the core lexicon of most frequently used words does not exceed 15–20 words. [1]
Adamatzky, Andrew. “Language of Fungi Derived from Their Electrical Spiking Activity.” Royal Society Open Science 9, no. 4 (April 2022). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926.
