Mycelium and Modular: The Basement Scientists and Sound Artists Growing Music From the Ground Up

Somewhere in a converted garage in Asheville, North Carolina, a musician named Delia Crane is watching a petri dish like it owes her money. She's not tripping — at least not right now. She's monitoring the electrical activity of a oyster mushroom mycelium colony, and the data is being fed in real time into a Eurorack modular setup that's humming in the corner. The output is something between ambient drone and a field recording of a forest slowly waking up. She calls it "listening to the network."

This is not a science fair project. This is the bleeding edge of a genuinely weird, genuinely thrilling countercultural movement happening in kitchens, basements, and backyard labs across the United States — one where DIY mycology and experimental music have tangled together into something that doesn't have a clean name yet.

Call it bioacoustic art. Call it fungal synthesis. Call it what it actually is: a bunch of brilliant weirdos refusing to wait for academia to catch up.

The Mycelium Network Is Already a Musician (It Just Needed an Interface)

Here's the thing most people don't know: fungi conduct electricity. Mycologists have documented electrical impulse patterns moving through mycelium networks for decades, and recent research — notably out of the UK — has suggested these signals may carry something resembling information. Whether that constitutes communication is still hotly debated. Whether it makes for interesting audio art is absolutely not.

"When I first read about the electrical spikes in mycelium, my first thought wasn't scientific," says Marcus Webb, a Portland-based sound artist who runs a small collective called Sporadic Signal. "My first thought was: that's a sequencer. That's a living, breathing sequencer that's been running longer than any synthesizer ever built."

Webb spent about eighteen months building a custom bioelectrical interface — cobbled together from open-source biofeedback hardware, Arduino microcontrollers, and a lot of trial and error — that translates mycelium voltage fluctuations into MIDI data. The result feeds directly into his modular rig and generates melodic and rhythmic patterns that are, in his words, "completely non-human and somehow completely musical."

He's not alone. From Brooklyn lofts to New Mexico desert studios, a loose network of artists and amateur scientists are doing variations on the same experiment, each arriving at slightly different conclusions and wildly different sounds.

The DIY Science Scene Nobody's Funding

Let's be clear about something: this is not happening in universities. It's not happening in corporate research facilities. The people doing this work are self-taught, self-funded, and operating entirely outside institutional approval — which is exactly why it's interesting.

The DIY biology movement, sometimes called biohacking, has been simmering in American counterculture for years. Community labs like Genspace in New York and BioCurious in Silicon Valley have made entry-level biological research accessible to anyone willing to put in the time. But the mycology-music crossover is happening in an even rawer, more decentralized space than that — think less co-working lab, more basement with a grow tent in the corner.

"I grow my own cultures, I build my own sensors, I write my own code," says Anya Solís, a Chicago-based artist who performs under the name Hyphae. "Nobody's giving me a grant. I'm doing this because it's the most interesting thing I've ever touched."

Solís's performances involve live mycelium colonies staged on tables in front of the audience, their electrical activity displayed on oscilloscopes while simultaneously driving her synthesizers. The effect is genuinely hypnotic — part concert, part science demonstration, part ritual. Audience members have described it as "meditative," "alien," and, more than once, "like being mildly high without having taken anything."

That last description is not accidental. Many of the artists in this space are drawn to mycology specifically because of its deep cultural association with psychedelic experience. Psilocybin mushrooms have been central to countercultural consciousness expansion since at least the 1960s, and the current wave of clinical research into psilocybin-assisted therapy has pushed fungi back into the cultural conversation in a big way. For these artists, working with mycelium is a way of engaging that tradition without necessarily putting anything in their bodies — though many of them are quick to note they do that too.

Sound Design Lessons From the Forest Floor

Beyond the biofeedback experiments, a quieter but equally compelling thread in this movement involves using fungal research to inform sound design rather than directly generate it.

Take Jonah Pruett, a Denver producer who spent two years studying mycorrhizal networks — the underground fungal webs that connect tree root systems in forests, sometimes called the "Wood Wide Web." Pruett became obsessed with the structural logic of how these networks distribute resources: not hierarchically, not randomly, but through something closer to decentralized consensus.

"I started thinking about arrangement and composition differently," he says. "In a mycorrhizal network, there's no center. Resources flow to where they're needed. What would an album sound like if it was structured that way instead of like a traditional song arc?"

The result was a self-released record called Anastomosis — a term for the point where fungal threads fuse — that abandons conventional verse-chorus structure entirely. Tracks bleed into each other, themes resurface in unexpected places, and the whole thing functions more like a single living organism than a playlist. It found its audience slowly, spreading through experimental music communities the way mycelium spreads through soil: quietly, persistently, without announcement.

The Ethics of Listening to Something That Might Be Listening Back

Not everyone in this space is comfortable with the philosophical implications of what they're doing. If mycelium really does process and transmit information — if it is, in some rudimentary sense, aware — then using it as a sound source raises questions that most experimental artists aren't used to asking.

"I think about consent a lot," admits Delia Crane, back in her Asheville garage. "Which sounds absurd when you're talking about a fungus. But the more I work with these organisms, the less absurd it feels."

This is the kind of thinking that would get you laughed out of a conventional biology department. In the underground art-science overlap, it's a totally normal conversation to be having at midnight over bad coffee and good weed.

That tension — between rigorous curiosity and spiritual openness, between empirical method and countercultural intuition — is exactly what makes this movement feel alive. These artists aren't waiting for permission, aren't waiting for peer review, aren't waiting for the mainstream to catch up. They're growing cultures in spare bedrooms and translating the results into sound, and the sound is genuinely unlike anything you've heard before.

Tune In, Grow Out

The mycelium-music underground doesn't have a festival yet, doesn't have a record label, barely has a name. But it has momentum. Artists are connecting through Discord servers and Instagram DMs, trading protocols for bioelectrical interfaces the way producers used to trade sample packs. Performances are happening in galleries, warehouses, and yes, still in garages.

If there's a thesis to what these people are doing, Anya Solís comes closest to articulating it: "Music has always been about finding patterns in chaos. Mycelium is the oldest pattern-maker on the planet. We're just finally learning to hear it."

The grid is alive, man. It just doesn't run on electricity.