Musical mushrooms: Fungi and plants play instruments via electrical sensors

In a community center in the north of England, two musicians can be heard mixing an improvised backing track as their bandmates hit the drums and keyboards.

But unlike ordinary bands, "Bionic and the Wires" features plants and fungi operating electronic instruments using the power of their biology.

Since 2023, co-creators Jon Ross and Andy Kidd have been plugging mushrooms and plants into sensors which translate their electrical language into musical notes, played through handmade bionic arms attached to instruments.

"We connect the plants through some equipment that measures the internal bioelectrical signals in the plant, and that's converted into a music language which is called MIDI, and that is then translated into motor signals, which is how the robotic arms move," Ross told Reuters from their rehearsal space inside the Boiler House, a community workshop in Manchester's Moss Side.

Using mushrooms supplied by local urban greening initiative Sow the City, along with plants, in the same performance creates beat variation in the music due to differences in their electrical activity and the resulting trigger rates of their bionic arms.

The Manchester-based band believes their creative form of music will change peoples' perceptions of plants and fungi, which they say are often overlooked as passive beings.

"It's a really good way to connect with them and a really sort of emotional experience," Ross said. — Reuters