In September a colleague tagged me in our team chat:
MIDI file from about 30 minutes of recording a living fly agaric in the forest 😂
He built the instrument himself. Two electrodes in the stem of the mushroom. A small timer chip that turns the mushroom’s electrical resistance into a tone. A Raspberry Pi Pico that measures that tone 200 times a second. A laptop that turns the drift into notes in C minor pentatonic.
The mushroom is the only thing making the music. Left alone it plays some 20 notes a minute. Touch it and it plays a flurry. The idea comes from the open Biodata Sonification project, the same family as PlantWave.
Lewis is a brilliant guy in my IT OPs team. He’s smart, and as you can see quite creative.
The file sat on my disk for five weeks. Today I finally had the time.
The raw recording
Over half an hour of mushroom is slow listening. I sped it up six and a half times: same notes, same pitch. Then I played it through a software synth with some reverb. Six minutes of fly agaric:
The song
Then I gave those six minutes to Suno and had it turn them into a song with something akin to a slow progressive psytrance theme.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/10/Mushroom-Song.html