November 2025
My sound experiments with mushrooms have been a wild journey. Nothing with mushrooms is full predictable. I started earlier this year thinking that if I choose a mushroom that’s slow-growing, maybe I can learn how it grows and find a way to get into its rhythm and cyclical nature. So I choose reishi (ganoderma). Here are some photos of my reishi grows.
Yesterday, I was experimenting with a jar of half-grown split gill mushroom (schizophyllum commune). Because I’m still a novice at growing mushrooms, I thought I could fruit the fungi from using an all-in-one grain jar with vermiculite, coco coir, and gypsum. So this wood-loving mushroom is only half-developed. The jar has mostly mycelium with some fruit leather on top, so fruiting bodies (sporocarps). I didn’t think there would be much conductance from this grow until I put copper wires in the jar and connected the wires to my synthesizer with a sensor.
Apparently schizophyllum commune is among some of the most “talkative” mushrooms. Compared to ghost, enoki, caterpillar fungi (cordyceps militaris), split gill fungi’s bioelectric patterns have shown some of the most complex sentence-like structure in a scientific study.
I love the split gill mushrooms also because they’re known to have roughly 27,000 sex types. Humans are so basic, right?
August 2025
There have been more crickets than usual this summer. They are usually outside of the house. But one day, a cricket started chirping from our defunct fireplace. Maybe it fell down the chimney. I couldn’t see it but I could hear it. Just one lone cricket.
I set up a binaural mic with yoga blocks. I placed it in the fireplace. I put on my headset and hit the record button. This is what I heard after a few minutes of record.
Our cat Winter decided to join the mix with her whistling nose. She wasn’t so sure about the binaural setup. Apparently the windscreens had an unusual scent.