Can fungi make music? This museum show makes it real
What's the story
The Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) in Exeter, England, is hosting a unique contemporary art show titled "Living Labyrinths." The exhibition aims to celebrate the "cultural world" of fungi through a variety of innovative installations. One such installation features musician Jason Singh, who spent hours in Devon woods creating a soundscape inspired by the electricity emitted by mycelium networks of fungi.
Artistic collaboration
Singh's work connects humans to mycelium networks
Singh used biofeedback sensors to measure the voltage emitted by mycelium networks and translated these into music.
He said, "All the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing."
This unique approach highlights how all living things generate and vibrate, providing a way for humans to connect with other life forms.
Mycological art
Exhibition features works by Beatrix Potter
The "Living Labyrinths" exhibition also features watercolors by Beatrix Potter, who was also a mycologist.
Her work was largely ignored during her lifetime but is now appreciated by modern mycologists.
The exhibition includes a recent piece titled "In Balance" by artist Jo Pearl, based on a fungus called Potteromyces asteroxylicola, named after Potter in 2023 when it was identified at the Natural History Museum.
Mycobiome exploration
Artist maps her own mycobiome
Another intriguing piece in the exhibition comes from Gemma Anderson-Tempini, who collaborated with scientists from the University of Exeter's MRC Centre for Medical Mycology to map her own mycobiome, the fungi living inside humans.
For her work "Myco-Mother," she collected red sandstone and chocolate-brown soil from Devon landscapes and ground them into watercolors.
Anderson-Tempini believes this is a first as nobody had drawn their own fungal ecology before.