Today, in our column, the planet itself speaks — with the voice of the mycelium.
The music does not rise from a stage, nor is it born under the performer's fingers. Its first impulses arise beneath our feet — in the finest living network that runs between the roots of trees, stones and fallen leaves.
This music cannot be heard by the human ear. But one can capture the electrical oscillations of the mycelium, translate them into sound — and suddenly find oneself inside a score that the forest is creating right now.
The British musician, composer and sound artist Jason Singh set off into the forests of Devon not to make nature play. He came as an attentive participant — with instruments, an open ear and a readiness to encounter a sound that has not yet taken a form familiar to humans.
Thus was born the work The Intelligence Below — "The Intelligence Below": a sound installation created in interaction with living mycelium.
And today the planet invites us to hear what has always sounded nearby — it is simply that our hearing had not yet been tuned to this frequency.
Into the forest — not for sound, but for an encounter
To create the piece, Singh spent many hours in the forests of Fingle and Jarner in the southwest of England.
The musician connected bioelectric sensors to the mycelium, registering changes in electrical voltage. The resulting values were then converted into sound parameters: pitch, rhythm, duration and timbre.
It is important to clarify: mushrooms do not perform a melody in the human sense, and the devices do not literally "translate the language of mushrooms." This is sonification — an artistic and research method in which measured data become audible.
The direction of the musical movement is set by a living system, but the way it is sonified is chosen by a human. Therefore, what we have before us is neither an independent composition by the fungus nor an ordinary authored work. It is an encounter between two ways of being present in the world — a biological process and human perception.
An electrical impulse becomes a note. A change in voltage becomes the movement of a melody. The invisible gains the ability to manifest within a range accessible to us.
Singh himself describes this work as an attempt to attune oneself to other living beings and to feel a connection with them.
Music that no one composed alone
The most beautiful thing about The Intelligence Below is the impossibility of naming a single author.
The mycelium creates electrical dynamics. Sensors capture its changes. A software system translates the data into sound. The musician chooses the parameters of translation and shapes the space of the work. The forest adds its own acoustics, the movement of air, humidity and the randomness of each moment. And the listener unites everything heard into a personal experience.
The work arises not within a single participant, but between them.
This is not an attempt to make nature play by human rules. Rather, it is an invitation to temporarily loosen habitual control and to hear what can be born in complicity.
The mycelium does not become a musical instrument. It remains a living system whose processes a human learns to perceive in a new way.
Living Labyrinths
The installation became part of the exhibition Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi — "Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi," which opens on 3 October 2026 at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter and will run until 21 February 2027. The preparation of the project took about five years.
The exhibition brings together contemporary art, history and mycology, showing fungi not only as forest organisms, but also as participants in complex relationships on which the life of entire ecosystems depends.
Alongside Singh's work are displayed fungal watercolours by Beatrix Potter. Long before the appearance of her famous fairy-tale characters, she studied fungi attentively and created precise botanical illustrations, yet her contribution to mycology remained long underappreciated during her lifetime.
The artist Jo Pearl turned to the history of Potteromyces asteroxylicola — a fossil fungus that received Potter's name in 2023.
And Gemma Anderson-Tempini, collaborating with researchers in medical mycology at the University of Exeter, created the work Myco-Mother. The artist depicted her own mycobiome — the community of fungi living inside the human body — using paints made from local soil and red sandstone.
Thus the exhibition gradually changes the direction of the gaze: from the mycelium beneath our feet — to the fungi within us.
What did this event add to the sound of the planet?
We are accustomed to considering music to be what a human creates: a voice, a string, a key, the rhythm of hands. But The Intelligence Below proposes to expand the very moment of the birth of a work.
The surrounding world is filled with processes that need not resemble ours in order to possess a value of their own. A tree, a mycelium, a human being, a device and a forest space do not exist here separately: each preserves its own nature and at the same time takes part in the emergence of a new experience.
That is precisely why we hear not merely a translation of electrical impulses. We hear the result of an encounter.
Life is already filled with movement, exchange and vibration. A human being does not add magic to it — he directs attention to where it has always been present.
And then, out of the invisible network, music arises that has no single author. There is only a living space of co-creation, where every form sounds in its own way, and heartfelt participation joins these voices into one endlessly unfolding symphony.
The world does not begin to sound at the moment when we connect the sensors.
At that moment we finally join in its sounding.
