Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/26/five-minutes-of-a-mushroom-playing-a-synthesizer.html
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Trippy.
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I grew these last year. I had no idea I was deep frying a musical genius! They were delicious. I will fry them again next year. Not so sure about hooking them up to a synthesizer. Prefer my dinner to not play for my entertainment first.
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Pink Öyster Cult really took the sound in a different direction.
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There’s only one Timelord that can deal with this threatening musical fungus…
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Less cowbell.
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Agaricus Vangelis
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Frankly I wish we could say 2020 was the year we got mushrooms to jam on synthesizers and call it a day. A shame Terence McKenna isn’t around to see it.
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And the artist “pink oyster mushroom” was eaten by a fan later that day…
Who knows what other great songs they could have shared with the world if only their fans were not so hungry.
I’m curious on how everything is wired. To make something musical but random wouldn’t you want more then two channels of data? Also you wouldn’t want data that is too random.
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There’s no chance that this fungi music will attract Purple Worms, right?
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Who didn’t guess that Pink Oyster Mushroom played prog?
Just needs a Roger Dean album cover.
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All the ‘signals’ coming from the mushrooms have already been modulated to fit in the range of synth control voltage (CV, in this case probably -5V to +5V for Eurorack, the most common standard, and using 1V per octave), so it’s not strictly random. A CV signal could also then be quantised to fit to a standard music scale to make something familiar and musical to a western ear.
In other words, there are plenty of ways to constrain the degree of randomness and still end up with something more or less musical, while still having an unpredictable result.
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This sounds a lot like some jam sessions that I went to in the early 90’s. There were some mushrooms involved there too but it was mostly fueled by weed.
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Did anyone make the “that band is a bunch of fun-guys” joke yet? I’ll take that one if it’s still available.
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The Mushroom isn’t really playing the synth, of course. This sounds like a variation on the “Krell Patch” which is a self playing patch accomplished through sampling a random voltage and sending it though feedback loops. Some voltage from the patch is being passed through the mushroom, which adds some resistance, but has no other effect.
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Don’t question his process!
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Sounds like someone playing the synth while on ‘shrooms’.
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Actually, now that you mention it, it explains a lot.
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