It’s 2025, anything can happen. Katy Perry’s been to space, woolly mammoths are making a comeback, and now mushrooms can play the piano. The latter is thanks to a Manchester-based music collective called Bionic and the Wires, who have created a machine to convert the fungi’s electrical impulses – caused by their natural biological processes – into movement, via a pair of robot arms.

Saying that the mushrooms can “play the piano” is, perhaps, a bit of a stretch. In reality, they slam mallets into individual keys on a keyboard. However, paired with human elements like pre-programmed synths or a backing band, it’s easy to imagine them as musicians in their own right (or at least a creative collaborator). “Bionic and the Wires challenge the traditional notion that art is an exclusively human endeavour,” the group explain, “by demonstrating that creativity can emerge from unexpected sources in nature.”

They aren’t alone. The inner life of mushrooms has been under the microscope for a while now, with some researchers suggesting that fungi – like trees – exhibit surprising levels of intelligence, and several musicians have aimed to channel this into their work. Below, we’ve gathered a short history of these musical mushroom collaborations (excluding magic mushrooms, because that list would be far too long... more on that here).

JOHN CAGE

The famous minimalist composer John Cage had a lifelong fascination with fungi and foraging. “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,” he wrote in a 1954 essay called Music Lover’s Field Companion, although he wanted to clarify: “I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds.” We never actually got to hear Cage use mushrooms in his work, but without them, we might never have heard the avant-garde compositions he’s famous for today. As he worked on his famous piece “4’33”, for example, he supplemented his income by selling foraged fungi to local restaurants in New York. Then again, he almost put a premature end to his career in 1954, after mistaking poisonous hellebore for a harmless skunk cabbage – subsequently rushed to hospital, he was told that if he’d waited 15 minutes longer he’d have died.

Going beyond just personal interest, Cage’s passion for mushrooms and music has endured decades after his death. In the late 50s, while teaching a class on experimental composition in New York, he incorporated mushroom identification field trips into the syllabus, which would eventually lead him to resurrect the New York Mycological Society. NYMS continues to “cultivate a dialogue between mycology and the arts” to this day.

THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS

The 1979 documentary The Secret Life of Plants, based on the book of the same name, explored some controversial ideas about plant sentience and telepathy. Documenting polygraph experiments by the plant scientist (and CIA interrogation specialist) Cleve Backster, the film considered music and sound as a way to comprehend the thoughts and feelings of plants and, of course, mushrooms. Many of its ideas would be dismissed by botanists as pseudoscience, but inspired many musicians and mushroom lovers to explore the connection further. See also: Stevie Wonder’s wild and “goofy” soundtrack.

MILEECE

Mileece, AKA Mileece Abson, is considered a pioneer in the field of plant-based music making. Since the early 2000s, she’s created physical tools and algorithms to translate plants’ and mushrooms’ electrical impulses into sound, a process she calls “aesthetic sonification”. Inspired by The Secret Life of Plants, she’s produced interactive installations like the Tate Modern’s Pip’s Plant Parlour, which invite visitors to interact with plants to create their own collaborative soundscapes.

MYCOLYCO

“Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer” has amassed 1.6 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded in 2020. Its creator, amateur mycologist and electronic musician Noa Kalos (or MycoLyco), has since found fans in musicians like SZA. In 2022, she even scored a Stella McCartney catwalk at Paris Fashion Week – an appropriate choice, for a show where the brand debuted its first ever mushroom leather bag. “It’s a creative collaboration between humans, mushrooms, and machines,” she told Rolling Stone of her practice in 2021, although she often eats her collaborators when all is said and done.

TARUN NAYAR

The musician Tarun Nayar has also tapped into the internet’s growing love of fungus. Beginning in the early days of Covid lockdowns, his sonic experiments with naturally-occurring mushrooms – via custom-built modular synths – are broadcast via the TikTok channel Modern Biology, which has attracted almost a million followers to date. The squelchy synths may be a projection of what Nayar thinks a mushroom’s thoughts might sound like, but the melodies they play are purely mushroom-made. Ever wanted to hear a fly agaric play “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”? Listen below.

DATA GARDEN

Over the years, most mushroom music has been made from a blend of nature’s hidden impulses and esoteric, independently-designed tech. There’s a very real future, though, where everyone could tap into the melodies beneath the surface of the humble fungus. The tech company Data Garden, for example, designs tools that can translate biodata from plants and mushrooms into sound via a phone app, encouraging users to “bask in the tranquility and increased sense of presence” that comes from connecting with nature. Dubbed Plantwave, most of the results right now sound suspiciously like the shimmering soundscapes on any other meditation app... hopefully mushrooms will have something more interesting to tell us in the future.