Midnight Mushroom Music

A start into Jamuary22 trying out a 3 patch challenge from Comparative Irrelevance. Maths/STØ/Rings only here we do not use the STØ (bc we do not own one) in its place we used the VCO side of a Maneco Labs Grone Drone.. with a short visit from a Mother 32.

Things grow dark fairly quickly, this is the way of the Grone! Letting go of 2021 heading into the future.. output just as time turned.

Mycelia premiered as the opening performance for A MAZE. / Berlin festival 2021 in VRChat. A meta-immersive living mycelium musical entanglement.

Nanotopia is known for hooking up fungi with electrodes and circuitry to record its various biodata and translating this biodata (often in real-time) through synthesisers both analog and digital.

In 2020 Tosca Terán was an invited participant in the New Nature Climate Science Exchange hosted by the Goethe-Institute, curated by Samara Chadwick. Through this exchange with other like-minded artists, technologists and scientists Tosca presented a proposal towards bringing living fungi biodata into a VR environment, creating a macroscopic experience of human and nonhuman entanglements within a forest environment. Working project title: Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis.

After the presentations Tosca and digital technologist Sara Lisa Vogl connected and later began work on the Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis project. Bringing in Neuroscientist/coder Brendan Lehman, Photogrammetric/new media artist Allison Moore, VR world builder Jason Stapleton, Sound designer Penelope Walcott, AR collaborator Peter Henderson, and early involved Arduino robot builder Lorena Salomé. Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis is generously funded by the Goethe-Institute Montreal, Canada Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council with sponsorship from bHaptics and ARTIVIVE.

Tosca and Sara Lisa thought it would be fun to participate in the A MAZE. / Berlin festival but knew the Sym/Dys project was far too large not to mention myriad COVID19 restrictions plus, looking at VRChat as a platform et viola! a Mycelia mood board branched out. Sara Lisa was introduced to the Meta Crew South Africa while working for SXSW and felt that this amazing group of creators might be interested in working on a Mycelia world - and they were!!

Concept for Mycelia was, of course, to bring living mycelium bio-sonification into VRChat with reactive audio aspects via a live human & nonhuman electronic music performance. Sara Lisa had been learning how to work with a Sports Pole in VR and thought she could add to the performance with an interpretive full-body tracked dance as spores above Tosca's avatar.

Living mycelium and human performances have taken place for

A MAZE. / Berlin

The Venice Film Festival 2021- VR Expanded

and the Raindance Film Festival where Mycelia won the Spirit of the Festival award.

nanotopia will be releasing the Mycelia performances soon. Here is a preview!

xoxox

Happy New Year 2022!

Forest UnderSound is an invitation to consider the sentience of fungi. Sentience is the ability to perceive one’s environment, and experience sensations such as pain and suffering, or pleasure and comfort. Many countries acknowledge animal sentience, and animal’s ability to experience pain, fear, distress, hunger, and thirst, in their laws, which are designed to protect animals from such suffering. In 1997, the European Union agreed to recognize animals as sentient beings under European law.

Animals and fungi share a common ancestor and branched away from plants at some point aproximately 1.1 billion years ago. It was only later that animals and fungi separated on the genealogical tree of life, making fungi more closely related to humans than plants.

For Forest UnderSound, mycelium from Ganoderma lucidum (Reishi/Lingzhi) and Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms), along with mycorrhizal fungi growing and connecting within the roots of various plants has been cultivated.

Both the plant roots and mycelium have electrodes connected to them that send biodata into purpose-built circuits, which detect micro-fluctuations in conductivity between 1,000-100,000 of a second. This biodata is then translated in realtime to control analog and digital synthesizers. Empirically, when fully connected and music is being generated, Mycelium consistently generates periodic patterns that are both enigmatic but also very musical. For reasons that I do not fully understand, Mycelium reacts to the proximity of some people more than others. Growing more frenetic or more harmonic or completely silent, when humans are present.

For the first iteration of Forest UnderSound fungi and plants will be allowed to grow over approximately 7 months, creating a real-time fungi forest soundscape. The soundscape will change over the seasons as the fungi and plants grow. During the 2021 Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall this soundscape will be recorded. Recordings take place on each of the 4 equinoxes.

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With support from: The Ontario Arts Council • A Space Gallery, Toronto • The Museum, Kitchener Ontario

Finally hooked up a Mother. After chatting with Aga (Ferment Radio) I wondered why I hadn't tried this yet. I mean, really.

Prior to setting the electrode probes into the SCOBY I did a little test with Apple cider vinegar and another with a bit of water just to see if the activity would be the same or similar- it was not.

Available for download, remix, etc.

Back in August 2020 I started cultivating Pleurotus djamor towards a presentation for the Remote Realities residency awarded to myself and technologist/collaborator Sara Lisa Vogl (regarding Symbiosis/Dysbiosis). After the presentation I gently placed the Pink oyster mushrooms aside. Last week, while exiting my music/sound making studio I noticed "Pinkie" and !! there was this beautiful mass of pink oysters emerging out of its grow bag. After apologising profusely I brought Pinkie back into the music studio and started recording. The Electrodes had been left within the mycelium, which is what I usually do. Here are the results of that music session. Hope you enjoy!

Created during COVID self-isolation. Moon in Cancer was recorded during our August 15th live stream. Check it out over on https://nanotopia.bandcamp.com

Thanks for listening!

Created during COVID self-isolation. Moon in Cancer was recorded during our August 15th live stream. Check it out over on https://nanotopia.bandcamp.com

Thanks for listening!

Created during COVID self-isolation. Moon in Cancer was recorded during our August 15th live stream. Check it out over on https://nanotopia.bandcamp.com

Thanks for listening!

Created during COVID self-isolation. Moon in Cancer was recorded during our August 15th live stream. Check it out over on https://nanotopia.bandcamp.com

Thanks for listening!

The Dye Maker

- Composed by:

Phaeolus schweinitzii for Music Works magazine

- The biodata of Phaeolus schweinitzii (common name: the Dye Maker’s polypore) was recorded during a Fall foray with the Mycological Society of Toronto at Dufferin forest, Mansfield ON 2019. MIDI translation took place in Toronto at co:Lab/nanopod studio

Performed by: Nanotopia (Tosca Terán, Andrei Gravelle) who brought the midi translation of the biodata into Ableton Live and gave Phaeolus schweinitzii a timbral voice.

The challenge to collaborating with non-human organisms is to try to minimize the sense of our own involvement in the process.

While I mediate the biodata gathered to temper it to determinant pitches and give it a timbral voice, I feel that the sense of rhythm and pattern captured in my field recordings represent a unique aspect of the fungi. While the biodata can sometimes be a starting point for further development, I chose this track, which has had minimal intervention on our part to convey the richness of the source material I gathered and hope that it creates inspiration and dialogue for not only new creative processes but to awaken new ways of seeing the diversity of life on our planet and lead to further multi-species entanglements.

- © info: Nanotopia.net/Midnight Mushroom Music -Tosca Terán