Nature’s DJ

Nature’s family of mushrooms are amazing and useful in a wide variety of ways. Some are healthy and delicious foods, others help to sustain farms and gardens, while still others just get you high. But Canadian musician Tarun Nayar has discovered an interesting new talent of the fungi family – they can make beautiful music! Nayar is a professional biologist, who has also been performing Indian classical music since childhood. Now he is able to blend his two talents together in what he calls "organismic music". It’s created by recording the bioelectric pulses from living fungi, and converting them into sounds that fit with his original musical compositions. 

To produce these fascinating sounds Nayar uses equipment that converts the mushrooms’ bioelectricity into musical information. Small changes in a plant's electrical resistance are detected and translated into musical notes by a series of modular synthesizers. As the electrical rhythm of the plant ebbs and flow its “music” finds its own beat. "At it's very simplest, I think this practice is a direct way to connect with the environment, and to remember that nature is alive. Literally everything is surging with electrical vibrations, and this composition technique taps into that."